- Salt Lake County's tax hike repeal effort failed to gather enough signatures.
- The group collected 13,447 signatures; only 6,311 were valid, 733 were rejected.
- Organizers submitted partial signatures, citing fiscal responsibility over a lengthy verification process.
SALT LAKE CITY — A resident-led effort to stop Salt Lake County's property tax increase of almost 15% from going into effect later this year did not gather enough signatures to be placed on the 2026 ballot.
Tax Referendum Salt Lake County, a group of county residents, was given the green light to begin collecting signatures in early January, after submitting an application on Dec. 15 to challenge the county's approval of the increase.
The push was initiated less than a week after the Salt Lake County Council's truth-in-taxation meeting on Dec. 9, at which it voted 8-1 to approve a property tax increase of approximately 14.65% for residents. While that number is lower than the initially proposed increase of nearly 20%, some residents still rebuked the tax hike, calling for a referendum, saying that money is tight right now, and the increase comes in the middle of an "affordability crisis."
The increase is expected to tack on an additional cost to residents of $64.92 a year on a home valued at $638,000.
Organizers had 45 days to collect signatures from a little more than 45,000 registered voters, with those signatures gathered in at least 75% of voter participation areas.
The deadline for signatures to be submitted to the Salt Lake County Clerk's office was Feb 9, by 5 p.m. Followed by a verification process to make sure enough signatures were collected to proceed with putting the repeal on the ballot.
Salt Lake County Clerk Lannie Chapman issued a letter to organizers on Wednesday, which was obtained by KSL, stating that the effort to repeal the tax increase had failed and would not make it on the November ballot.
Chapman, in the letter, said the group collected 13,447 signatures. 6,311 of those were deemed valid, 733 were rejected, and 6,403 were not reviewed.
On Wednesday evening, Chapman told KSL that the rejected signatures could have been due to various reasons, such as incorrect signatures, out-of-county signatures, or bad addresses.
"There's a process in place for people to attempt to have a decision or a law repealed — which is amazing that we have that ability in the state — but unfortunately, they didn't meet the threshold required," she said.
However, Goud Maragani, a spokesperson for Tax Referendum Salt Lake County, responded to the letter in a post on 'X' Wednesday night, saying that the group submitted only a portion of the signatures after realizing the amount collected would not meet the required threshold.
"As we noted, we had a clear view of the total incoming packets — which we estimate exceeded 20,000 — and realized the statutory bar was out of reach," he said.
Maragani added that "rather than wasting taxpayer money on a multiweek verification process for a miss, we chose the fiscally responsible path to end the signature phase and move directly into budget analysis for the statutory mid-year review of the budget in June."
