Current Issues

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Most municipalities know when they have a problem, but often they don’t know how to fix it.  Every city is required to have plans and ordinances in place, but keeping them maintained is a daunting task.  Often the need for quality planning/regulation support is highest in communities that can least afford it.  The smaller the […]

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Admittedly, when we’re all focused on germs, earthquakes, evaporating 401k accounts, and praying mightily that our Netflix keeps streaming … the issue of our investment in UtahAPA probably isn’t top-of-mind. However, professional planners should be the first to realize that the way to get where we want to be in the future is to actively […]

I do a lot of the grocery shopping at my house. I do it mostly because I never want to run out of chocolate, but also because I never want the greatest hits of Kenny G, Wham, and Whitney Houston to stop looping in my head. I’ve been doing this for years, but only recently started to understand…

The returns on a community’s planning process are many, but the sources of funding support are few. Regardless of where a community is located in Utah, there aren’t a lot of options for planning grants. This is particularly unfortunate because competition for capital project funding continues to increase, and more often than not, those projects […]

There are societal trends that will drive demand for multi-generational housing. Many community residents are campaigning to maintain a low-density single-family development for most parts of their town, but they might be changing their opinion for their own property. Consider these trends: Many families are looking for solutions for the millennial “boomerang generation” as well […]

Local government faces unique and difficult challenges that will require new thinking in areas such as information accessibility and reliability, infrastructure development and maintenance, land use decision making, budget development, and workforce issues. We are looking for communities that are interested in partnering to solve local government problems at their core, not just addressing the […]

We’ve always heard that special service districts are the forgotten middle-children of government.  It’s accurate, and it hurts. We looked for information about why they exist (vs. why a city doesn’t just provide services directly).  It took more digging than we thought it should because SSDs don’t tell their story much. Here’s the highlights of […]