A Public Infrastructure District, or PID, is a way for a developer to borrow money to build roads, sewers, and other infrastructure for a new neighborhood or resort — and then pay that money back using property taxes charged only to the people who eventually buy homes there.
Utah didn't have this tool until 2019. Since then, PIDs have issued more than $5.2 billion in bonds statewide. Somebody has to sell those bonds to investors, advise the local government on how to structure them, and hold the money in trust once they're issued. That's investment banking work, and in Utah it's dominated by a small handful of firms — some of whom also helped write the law that created this market, and some of whom show up on multiple sides of the same deal.
This page traces who those firms are, what roles they play, and what that means for the homeowners who end up paying the bill.
A law with no market to serve it — until a team built one
Public Infrastructure Districts didn't exist in Utah before 2019. They were created by S.B. 228, the Public Infrastructure District Act, sponsored by then-Sen. Dan McCay with Rep. James Dunnigan as House sponsor. The bill passed the 2019 General Session and took effect May 14, 2019.
At the time, there was no PID financing market in Utah for the simple reason that PIDs didn't exist yet. That market had to be built — and it was built by a specific pair of bankers, working for a specific firm, in the specific years right after the law passed.
The team moved firms. The business came with it.
In 2019, when SB 228 passed, bankers Sam Sharp and Zach Bishop worked at D.A. Davidson & Co., not Piper Sandler. Piper Sandler's own later hiring announcement credits the pair with building "a market-leading presence in the Colorado metro district space" and introducing "a new market for special districts in Utah" — work done while they were still D.A. Davidson employees.
A necessary caveat
Piper Sandler's 2021 quotes describe what "our team" did — and that team didn't join Piper until more than a year after SB 228 passed. What the record supports is that the individuals now running Piper's Utah PID business say they helped pass the law, while working for a different firm at the time. It does not establish that Piper Sandler, as a company, had any role in the 2019 legislation.
Two firms, one team's legacy, and half the Utah market
The Bond Buyer's "Southwest Midyear Review" (Aug. 18, 2026), sourced to LSEG data, ranks the largest senior managers of all Utah municipal bonds — not PIDs alone — for the first half of 2026:
Note: This figure is the par value of bonds for which each firm served as senior manager — not revenue, fees, or profit. D.A. Davidson and Piper Sandler together account for more than half of all Utah municipal bond volume tracked in this ranking.
Zions isn't the underwriter. It's often everything else.
In that same Bond Buyer table, one firm outranks both underwriters combined in its own category: Zions Bank ranks #1 Financial Advisor statewide, at $734.1 million — larger than either D.A. Davidson's or Piper Sandler's underwriting volume.
Zions Bank Public Finance is registered with the SEC and MSRB as both a municipal advisor and a municipal securities dealer. Across a single PID's life, Zions and its affiliates can plausibly touch:
"Corporate Trust's desire to do business with CLIENT could create an incentive for Zions to recommend a course of action that increases the level of CLIENT's business activity with this affiliate." — Zions Public Finance's own municipal advisory agreement (Springdale, Utah, May 2023)
That's not an outside allegation — it's Zions' own written disclosure of the structural conflict built into offering both advisory and trust services to the same government client.
How this played out on one real Utah PID
Before the Nordic Village PID (Weber County) existed, a political action committee connected to the development paid Zions Bank to review a resort feasibility study. Zions was later installed as trustee on the PID's $25 million bond issuance — replacing the original trustee in November 2025. The advisory relationship was established before the district was ever created.
Zions is not the only trustee active on Utah PIDs — U.S. Bank and UMB Bank both serve as trustee on other 2025 Utah districts. But Zions' financial-advisor role recurs across projects regardless of who ultimately underwrites the bonds, including on the Black Desert PID (Washington County), where D.A. Davidson underwrote the bonds but Zions Public Finance was separately designated in the district's own governing document.
The scale, statewide
PIDs are marketed as a way to fund growth without raising anyone's existing taxes. In practice, the debt is repaid by the property owners inside the district — often future homebuyers who had no vote in creating it and no seat on the board that governs it. Closing documents may disclose the existence or maximum rate of a PID assessment, but they don't necessarily present a buyer with one fixed lifetime cost; that number depends on future assessed values, annual levies, bond terms, and any refinancing down the road.
None of this proves wrongdoing on its own. It documents something worth seeing clearly: the same small circle of firms shows up again and again — writing the studies, advising the government, underwriting the bonds, and holding the money — on the debt that Utah homeowners in PID districts are the ones repaying.
Plain-language terms
- PID
- Public Infrastructure District — a special government entity created to finance infrastructure through bonds repaid by property taxes inside its boundary.
- Senior Manager / Underwriter
- The investment bank that structures and sells a bond issue to investors.
- Municipal Advisor
- Advises the government entity creating the district on financing strategy — legally required to act in the client's best interest.
- Trustee
- The bank that holds and administers bond funds after issuance, making sure payments go where they're supposed to.
- Par Value
- The face amount of a bond — not the fee or profit the bank makes from selling it.
- Feasibility Study
- An analysis, often commissioned by the developer, used to justify creating a PID in the first place.