The Slope is sure to be built now that the Utah Court of Appeals has sided with Heber City’s decision to deny a referendum on the issue. The decision means that Heber City residents won’t have the chance to vote on whether a 95-acre annexation to The Slope development, which broke ground in April, should be allowed in the North Village. Three residents — Tracy Taylor, Tracy Taylor, Lindy Reioux and Joseph Barney, son of Heber City Councilor Yvonne Barney — filed the application following a 3-2 Heber City Council decision on Dec. 17, 2024, approving the 56- and 39-acre annexation near the intersection U.S. 40 and S.R. 32 for the North Village Crossings and Harvest Village mixed-use developments, respectively.  North Village Crossings was approved for 354 residential units, 60 hotel rooms and 10 commercial retail spaces as well as a gas station. Harvest Village, now called The Slope, will have 140 villas, 130 multi-family affordable units, a hotel with 85 rooms, 62 condos and 100,000 square feet of retail. The three residents did not file their referendum application, which could have allowed residents to vote to approve or deny the annexation rather than the City Council, until Jan. 23, 2025, two days after the City Council approved its agreements with the developers but over a month after it passed the annexation ordinance, which is what the referendum would have challenged. Utah code requires referendum applications be made within five days of the law in question being passed. “We can understand why they waited until after the development agreements were approved to file the application,” the Court of Appeals’ ruling states. “But the ballot referendum challenges the (annexation) ordinance and not the development agreements, and thus the application was required to be filed within five days after the ordinance passed on Dec. 17, 2024.” State code says 29% of voters would have to sign a referendum petition for the issue to qualify for the ballot. But the municipality must first approve the referendum application. Heber City Recorder Trina Cooke denied the trio’s referendum application because it was not timely. Reioux, Taylor and Joseph Barney filed a petition for judicial review of Heber City’s decision in February 2025.  “The effective date for referendum purposes should be the date when all conditions of the annexation were satisfied, not merely when the initial motion was passed,” reads Taylor, Reioux and Joseph Barney’s Fourth Judicial District notice of appeal. Fourth District Court Judge Jennifer Mabey sided with Heber City in July 2025, citing the missed deadline. The referendum applicants then appealed Mabey’s ruling with the state Court of Appeals, which sided with the Fourth District Court judge. “While the (annexation) ordinance was amended prior to the vote to be ‘contingent upon the approval and execution of’ the two development agreements,’ that contingency did not mean the ordinance did not pass upon the Council’s vote. Rather, it simply functioned to delay the ordinance’s effective date until the execution of the additional agreements,” the ruling stated. The ruling also stated the judges were “not unsympathetic” to Taylor, Reioux and Barney, in part because they were representing themselves legally when they filed the referendum application. Heber City Public Information Officer Ryan Bunnell called the referendum process “grassroots citizen activation” that he loves and supports. “The core problem on this one was the timing, and that fact is unavoidable,” he said. “The danger of making one exception is that it legally opens a door for others to say, ‘You did it for them, why not for us?’ In an extreme situation, that injustice could escalate through the court system. Making exceptions is an unfair practice in the context of law.” The post North Village annexation will not make ballot after Court of Appeals rules a deadline was missed appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less