Manti will put building on ballot
Residents collected signatures to force special election
Sanpete County and the Utah Administrative Office of the Courts have been jointly planning the $5.4 million structure for more than a year. Plans call for Sanpete County to issue bonds and build the 22,000-square-foot facility. The court system would lease the building, and the lease revenue would pay off construction bonds.
County commissioners have said courtrooms and court offices in the Sanpete County Courthouse about a half-mile down the highway do not meet modern security requirements. They also say a new court building would free up space for county government, which has expanded to keep pace with Sanpete County's 23 percent population growth over the past decade.
Leaders of the drive turned in 200 pages of signatures. They needed signatures from 20 percent of the county's 12,170 "active" registered voters, defined as voters who have voted at least once in the past five years, or 2,436 signatures. They ended up with 2,682.
Some petition signers were not strongly opposed to the building or even the location but felt the county commission had tried to launch the project without the public knowing about it.
Other residents were concerned that the court building site cuts a swath out of the Sanpete County Fairgrounds. Commissioners have said they plan to move the fairgrounds "footprint" to the north of the current site. They have said many fairgrounds facilities, including the rodeo grandstand, are decrepit and need to be replaced anyway.
But the most vocal opponents have expressed fears that criminal defendants — and the friends and associates of defendants — who might attend court hearings pose a danger to children using the swimming pool, which would be next door, and to students at Manti High School, which is two properties away.
"We are afraid," Greg Dettinger, a Manti High School teacher and former county commissioner, said at a public hearing in October. "There have been school shootings, and we see on the TV every day violence making its way into our schools."
"This is a dangerous world," Rebecca Frischknecht, a Manti parent, said at the hearing. "We don't want child predators looking at our kids and giving them drugs."
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