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Show Art Brothers reportedly has proposed changing the boundaries of several counties in the state. His proposal goes so far as to create a new county called Powell out of portions of Emery, Wayne, Garfield and Kane counties and eliminate Piute and shake up Sevier. He also suggests whacking the west end off Uintah County and giving it to Duchesne County. Brothers owns and operates the tiny Beehive Telephone Company. He made an attempt to purchase the Uintah Basin Telephone Association and was voted down. His most recent activity in the local area has been an attempt to get Public Service Commission authority authori-ty to let his company install telephone service to the Deseret Generation and Transmission Cooperative Bonanza Power Plant instead of Mountain Bell. Brothers claims Mountain Bell was not adequately serving the Bonanza area so he wanted to. As a result Mountain Moun-tain Bell has sped up its expansion plans for the Bonanza area. The area proposed by Brothers in Uintah County to be given to Duchesne County conform to the area served by the Uintah Basin Telephone Association. Associa-tion. This area would include the communities com-munities of Ballard, Tridell, Lapoint and Randlett. We expect Brothers would also like to include Ft. Duchesne as well. Brothers says he will make his proposal pro-posal of county line changes to the Utah Legislature either this year or next. The matter would require an election by all affected counties. We doubt that an election in either Uintah or Duchesne Counties would support Brothers' proposal, but admittedly admit-tedly there are problems along the growing area of west Uintah County. Already the Utah Legislature House of Representatives has cut out the Ballard area from Uintah County as the House District and given it to Duchesne County. The reasoning here is that Uintah Uin-tah County's population was too large for a House of Representatives district. At one time Roosevelt City had plans to incorporate across county lines into Uintah County with special legislative provisions, but the Ballard area quickly quelled the move by incorporating up to the Roosevelt City boundary on the Uintah Uin-tah and Duchesne county line. The west side of Uintah County has great potential growth. This area has been the center of much oil drilling activity. ac-tivity. In fact it is probably the reason for Uintah County leading the state during dur-ing 1980 in total footage drilled. According Accor-ding to the Utah Division of Oil and Gas reports Uintah County had a total of 595,300 feet of drilling in 1980. The closest contender for this amount was Grand County for 209,385 feet, then San Juan County, 188,010 feet; Summit County, 159,249 feet and then Duchesne County for 154,516 feet. With this oil drilling activity the west side of Uintah County has become a more valuable area, and no wonder Brothers can see why it would be to the advantage of Duchesne County or the Uintah Basin Telephone Association to adopt the area into Duchesne County. School and church activities on the west side have almost entirely gone to the Duchesne County side. This has been because of the natural geographical location of the westside communities. The distance of the county seat in Uintah and Duchesne Counties is equal distance from the county line of the two counties. But the population growth centered in the Roosevelt and Ballard areas make this area a natural for consolidating con-solidating into one unified area. It is possible that continued growth could unite the westside area into Duchesne County, but it is just as likely that continued growth will draw the two areas apart and make them all the more independent of one another. If the two areas decide themselves that changing the county line would be an advantage to the area, we can understand the reasoning. But when the owner of a small telephone company that has failed in his attempt to come into the area presents the idea to change the Uintah-Duchesne county line, we begin to wonder what his interests in-terests really are. We don't expect the county line to change just as we don't expect any state lines to be changed because of overlapping growth patterns. If this were allowed we would have boundary changes every session of our state and federal legislatures. Sometimes it is a nice outlet to discuss the merits of a boundary change but boundaries are boundaries and changing them should only be by ' the entire voice of the people involved. |