Over the past several weeks I have attended the city council meetings having to do with the budget for June 2025-2026, and I had a burning question: What is our city actually authorized to spend our money on?
I searched our city’s website and found no detailed documentation about what the city’s charter is. There are some older meeting minutes as well as a news article or two online that make mention of an alleged charter back in the day. A charter functions like a Constitution, but for a city: It is an exhaustive list of all the powers that we the people grant the municipal government to exercise on our behalf, in addition to providing structure and express limitations and checks on its power.
I called our city recorder and she was able to get documents to me very responsively about American Fork’s articles of incorporation (1853). Articles of incorporation aren’t the same thing as a citizen-ratified charter, but they do contain some goodies that we talk too little about. For example, it purports to grant to the city power to levy taxes to build and maintain roads and aqueducts, and even to regulate powder magazines and build parapets and defensive walls. Good times! In short, the articles of incorporation provide us with useful talking points because they contain an enumeration of powers–whether those powers are ratified by the citizenry is a different matter, but at a minimum, it can safely be assumed that no unenumerated power actually belongs to the city.
On that note, there are several big things these articles of incorporation do not include. As I look through their grant of powers in comparison to our spending items, there are evident areas of non-overlap. I raised to the city council my questions about numerous special spending projects under the headings such as “economic development” and “(re)-investment”. The articles of incorporation make reference to maintaining public marketplaces, but there are worlds of difference between public marketplaces and economic development funds in general, or “investing”. In fact one of the reasons why “investment” as a priority and the city’s signaling of “economic development project areas” raise a red flag with me is that this is the very sort of thing that Governor Cox’s BUILD Council executive order (a reincarnation of the legislature’s “Beehive Development Agency” from its failed SB337 “Land Use and Development Amendments” bill) and federal analogues attempt to accomplish: Practically unlimited power of the purse to claim eminent domain for their own purposes (think of an HOA with the size and funding of the Death Star) and pick and choose winners and losers in private markets.
I asked about the outstanding small business loan our city has allegedly issued and have yet to receive an answer. Nothing in our city’s articles of incorporation appears to authorize the city to issue loans. Then there is the high and medium high density housing development project by the frontrunner station and other projects like the Egg Farm Development Area’s “affordable housing” mandatory spending. (You can find the special project funds on pages 132-142 of the city’s published budget packet here.)
The PARC tax has earmarked $1,565,000 for the 2025-26 budget. If there are 40,000 residents in American Fork, that’s about $40 per person per year. The amount paid per taxpayer would be considerably higher (likely $100 or more). Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy our parks, but most of this fund isn’t going towards parks. I don’t see opera halls, dance houses or entertainment troupes in the powers ostensibly granted to the city in its articles of incorporation. Do you?
I have been asked about broadband, fiber and the recreation center. The answer I give is simple: If we did not give our municipal government authority to do those things in its charter, then it has no authority to do them. It’s as simple as that. The Founding Fathers understood this as the principle of popular sovereignty.
If we don’t see a specific grant of power to do some things in the city’s enumerated powers, We don’t just start doing them and then assume they are legitimate. If the people think that something needs to be funded by the city as a public facility that was not formerly recognized by them as such via the grant of powers to the government, then the people need either to vote that into a charter or reconsider whether it truly belongs as a governmental operation as opposed to being serviceable through the private sector.
If I am elected, I will urge our city council to adopt formally a charter form of government, which the state recognizes in some form under Article XI, Section 5, although the power of the people is actually greater than that recognized under this article–actually returning power to the people to say what the government can do (and correspondingly, forbidding it to do anything they do not authorize it to do). Let me know your thoughts, frustrations, questions, comments and insights. Thanks as always for defending your neighbor’s rights.
I invite the city council members, mayor and candidates for city office to respond to these questions about any documented grant of powers relative to these budget categories, and the source of the city’s power.
Link to incorporation documents:
https://collections.lib.utah.edu/details?id=719507
-Seth
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