A little-known Utah statute puts school trust land outside county zoning entirely — and the Governor's own staff holds a seat on the board that decides how it gets used.
Utah counties zone the land inside their borders — except when they can't. A statute most residents have never heard of puts state-owned trust land, including the acreage SITLA manages on behalf of public schools, outside a county's reach entirely. The same statute follows a private developer who leases or is permitted to use that land. And the board that decides how SITLA's land gets used isn't independent of the Governor's office — one of its members sits there explicitly to represent the Governor. In December 2024, that exemption stopped being theoretical: a SITLA official told two Utah city councils, by name, that the agency would use it.
Utah Code §17-79-306, "State and federal property," governs counties. A matching statute governs cities and towns. Both read, in relevant part:
(1) As used in this section, "property owned by the state" includes property owned as school and institutional trust land…
(2) Unless otherwise provided by law, nothing contained in this chapter may be construed as giving a county jurisdiction over property owned by the state or the United States.
(3) Subsection (2) applies to property owned by the state that is occupied or used by a person under a permit or lease.
Subsection (3) is the part that matters most in practice: it isn't just SITLA that's outside county zoning — it's anyone developing SITLA land under a lease or permit from the agency. A private developer working trust land under such an agreement inherits the same exemption.
The renumbering itself changed nothing substantive — Utah recodified its county land-use statutes in a 2025 special session, and this section moved from Title 17, Chapter 27a to Title 17, Chapter 79 along with dozens of others. The underlying text is unchanged.
SITLA's seven-member Board of Trustees is appointed by the Governor and confirmed by the Senate. Six come from a list supplied by a nominating committee; the seventh the Governor can appoint entirely on his own, with no list required. The board then hires the agency's Executive Director — but only "with the consent of the governor."
One current trustee, Mike Mower, is also Gov. Cox's Senior Advisor for Community Outreach and Intergovernmental Affairs — a member of the Governor's own senior staff. Asked about the role in a University of Utah law school interview, Mower put it plainly:
"I represent the governor on the School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration (SITLA) board, and we deal with a lot of oil and gas law and property law."
Mike Mower, S.J. Quinney College of Law interview
SITLA's own February 2026 board meeting minutes show Mower actively voting and making motions — this isn't a ceremonial or lapsed appointment.
The clearest confirmation of the exemption's real-world force doesn't come from an outside legal reading — it comes from SITLA's own general counsel. In a 2016 Salt Lake Tribune story about a gravel pit proposed on SITLA land near Torrey, in Wayne County, general counsel John Andrews stated the agency's legal position without qualification:
"When it comes to state lands, counties have no legal basis for asserting a zoning preference."
John Andrews, SITLA General Counsel — Salt Lake Tribune, 2016
Wayne County commissioners were advised the same thing directly, and formally agreed not to act on the rezone request as a result — a real case of a county declining to exercise zoning authority specifically because of this exemption, eight years before the Wasatch episode below. The Utah Association of Counties intervened in that dispute to challenge whether counties have zoning jurisdiction over SITLA land at all. No Utah Supreme Court ruling has squarely resolved the question since — it remains genuinely unsettled a decade later.
But Andrews, in that same interview, described a very different day-to-day practice:
"SITLA has gone to as great a length as we can to give local government input on land use… If the county says this is not the place for it, we take no for an answer."
John Andrews, same interview
He pointed to a specific example: SITLA pulled a Parker Mountain conservation-easement sale after Wayne County objected to it. Both statements are true at once — the legal exemption is real, and so is a long practice of not using it.
A Garfield County example makes the same point from the other direction. Planning commission minutes from a May 2024 meeting on the "Promise Rock" SITLA property near Cannonville show the county amending its own zoning ordinance to state that zoning designations on SITLA-owned property are discontinued, and that SITLA parcels are only zoned once sold into private ownership — a Utah county formally conceding the exemption in writing, in an unrelated dispute.
In Wallingford v. Moab City (2020 UT App 12), a developer's project near Moab needed modifications a local ordinance classified as "major changes" — requiring a public hearing. The city instead entered a contract with the developer and SITLA agreeing to treat the changes as "minor" and skip the hearing. Citizens sued. The Utah Court of Appeals struck the agreement down as illegal "contract zoning," ruling the city couldn't bargain away its own public-process requirements by private contract.
The exemption stopped being an abstract legal question in December 2024. At a joint Heber City/Wasatch County council meeting, SITLA representative Gregg McArthur told both councils, on the record, that SITLA would move forward on this exact 720–740 acre parcel with or without local support:
"We'll exercise our exemption, and we'll get affordable housing on this property… We're a state entity, and we can put what we want on those lands now."
Gregg McArthur, SITLA — KSL, Dec. 2, 2024
McArthur tied the threat directly to Gov. Cox's stated housing-supply goals, and named the financial incentive driving it: raising density on the parcel could take SITLA's revenue on this land from roughly $3.6 million to more than $15 million. He also confirmed this is not an isolated case — SITLA has already invoked the exemption once before, on a separate parcel near Moab, and named four more Washington County parcels being prepared for the same treatment.
SITLA did not respond to KSL's request for comment on the story.
The clearest real-world test case so far sits next to Wasatch County's Wasatch Highlands preliminary-municipality project, covered in the companion piece above. Philo Development sought a "legislative development agreement" from Wasatch County for 740 acres of adjacent SITLA land — 144 lots where current zoning allows one unit per 160 acres. The County Council rejected it in August 2026, and developer Greg Whitehead publicly called the denial "retaliation" for the separate preliminary-municipality filing.
Twice before the 2024 threat, and once again after it, SITLA and its developer went through the county's normal process rather than invoking the statutory exemption — a real, 20-year pattern of treating this specific parcel as subject to county review, whatever the bare statute allows. As of this writing, no public record shows the exemption has actually been exercised on this parcel. The threat stands; it has not yet been carried out.
Water availability, not zoning authority, was one of the two reasons councilors gave for the August rejection — a reminder that a county's practical leverage over a project doesn't rise or fall on the zoning-jurisdiction question alone. Wasatch County has also used this same "legislative development agreement" tool itself, twice, to get things it wanted from other developers: a 75-foot community lodge at SkyRidge, and the LDS Church's Heber Valley Temple.
SITLA's own practice varies from county to county, and even within the same county over time. Three documented cases show three different outcomes:
| County | What happened | SITLA's posture |
|---|---|---|
| Wayne (2016) | Gravel pit proposed on SITLA land; county advised it lacked zoning jurisdiction, formally declined to act. | Exemption asserted; county deferred without a vote |
| Millard (Jan. 2026) | County approved rezoning 4,400+ acres, much of it SITLA land, for a solar farm tied to AI data-center development, over public opposition on water use. | Ordinary county process; no jurisdiction dispute |
| Wasatch (2004–2026) | SITLA sought rezoning twice, denied twice; negotiated a development agreement; rejected a third time in Aug. 2026, despite a 2024 public threat to bypass the county entirely. | Negotiated for two decades; exemption threatened, not yet used |
Read together, these show SITLA choosing among several available postures — assert the exemption, negotiate voluntarily, withdraw after local opposition, or run the county's ordinary process — on a case-by-case basis. The statute doesn't predict which one happens next; SITLA's own revenue incentives, and how firmly a county pushes back, appear to matter more than any consistent policy.