Community Announcements & Events

• The Music in the Park concert series has ended for the year. A big shout out and thank you to Richard Watson- volunteer extraordinaire- who organizes the concerts in addition to his other volunteer activities with the Bountiful Food Pantry and Bountiful Rotary. If you love the summer concerts, we need your help by donating to and attending the fundraiser concert to raise money for the next summer season. The fundraiser concert with Toast will be September 4th at 7:00 pm at Woods Cross High School. Ticket details can be found HERE. If you can’t attend, but want to support the summer concert series with a donation, you can do so HERE. 

• September is fire prevention month and the South Davis Metro Fire District will be holding an open house at Station 81 in Bountiful (255 S. 100 W.) on September 9th from 6-8 pm to teach the community about how to prevent fires and what to do in case of one. This is a fun annual event, especially for the kiddos- and let’s be honest the big kiddos as well. There’s an opportunity to meet firefighters try out some equipment, ride in a fire truck, and learn how to stay safe.  Details can be found below on the flyer for this fun annual event. 

• Please mark your calendars for the 9/11 Day of Service. Our service date will be on Saturday, September 12th at 9:00 am with a handful of projects residence can pick from including: 1) working at the Bountiful Food Pantry, 2) landscape help at Creekside Park, or 3) clean up and landscaping at the Veterans Park. If you decide to join the park projects, please bring shovels, rakes, gloves and other landscaping tools with you. This is the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and it falls in the year of our 250th birthday. It feels fitting that we mark a somber day and event by joining together to make a difference in the community.  You can find the details for the events HERE. 

• Bountiful City will be hosting our annual Bountiful Business Symposium on Tuesday, September 15th from 7:30-10:00 am at city hall. This is an annual free event for all business owners and operators within the city. It is a chance to network with local businesses, learn more about what the city is doing overall, and hear from our keynote speaker Zions Bank Senior Economist Robert Spendlove. If you haven’t had an opportunity to ever hear from Robert, I promise you he makes the business of understanding market forces and economics fun, interesting, and engaging. Details about the symposium are HERE and you can register by emailing licensing@Bountiful.gov.

• The Freedom‘s Light Festival will be Sept. 17-19 at the Bountiful City Park and is part of our Bountiful250 celebration and learning opportunities. The festival will provide an opportunity to teach and tell the stories of America’s founding through reenactment and engagement with historical figures. If you are looking for a way to help your family continue to feel the America250 spirit as we head into the fall put this event on your calendar and you can find the details HERE.

• A local group has organized an “All About AI Community Conversation” for parents, teachers & families. The event will be Sept. 17th at 7:00 pm at the Builder Studios 450 S. 400 E. The event is intended to bring experts from the community to explore how AI is shaping childhood, education and family life. Details and RSVP information are on the flyer below.

• The 2026 Farmers Market is on Thursday evenings and runs through October 15th. 

Fire Chief Badge Ceremony

Our South Davis Metro Fire Chief Jeff Larsen was formally sworn in with a badge ceremony on August 17th. A badge ceremony is an event where a firefighter or a police officer is formally promoted to their new rank. The badge represents not only rank, but responsibility, trust, service, and stewardship especially for the role of Chief. This was an important event for our fire service to complete the promotion and the changing of the guard to Chief Larsen. Here are a few pictures from the ceremony with the Chief's wife Melissa pinning his badge and then with Chief Larsen with myself and Mayor Ryan Westergard of Woods Cross. 

New & Updated City Website

It was time for a refresh! Bountiful City has redone our website and it is now launched and live. If you had previously bookmarked Bountifulutah.gov change your bookmarks to Bountiful.gov. Hopefully you’ll notice a refreshed and streamlined experience for all your city needs on the new website. It should also launch and display better on mobile devices as that is how many people use the website now. If there is something that you routinely use or look up on the website, it might be in a new spot, so click around a little bit and see if you can find it. If it turns out we’ve missed something and some piece of information, a form, or activity is no longer listed let me know so we can fix it. Migrating a whole city website is a big task and it’s possible we might have missed something or not realize an element was highly used by the community. There are still a few features in development, for instance we would like for residence to be able to reserve park pavilions online to streamline and ease that process. Look for that to rollout in phase 2 of the website upgrades. Hopefully, you’ll find that the website is a helpful and useful tool for engaging the city and finding info easily when needed. 

Traffic Safety Updates

Traffic safety has been a focus of the city this summer sadly driven in part by several accidents, including a tragic auto-pedestrian fatality. We asked the Police Department to step up traffic enforcement in key areas where we are noticing issues including the Main Street corridor and crosswalks. As kids have headed back to school, crosswalks and intersections are particularly important to carefully navigate. It is your duty as a driver of a vehicle to fully stop when traffic signs or signals dictate before a crosswalk. Earlier this week, while on our morning dog walk Henry and I were nearly hit by a driver turning right on a red light that did not see us nor stop before turning as we used the crosswalk. Luckily our reflexes kept us from being hit as we jumped back (and yes, I was not happy about the incident and nearly being smooshed but still managed to gesture to the driver with ALL my fingers that I’m walk’n here!). As an entire community, we need to be more mindful when behind the wheel, particularly as in a few months the light will shift and kids will be walking to school in the semi-dark and using the crosswalks. 

The emphasis on traffic safety has come with some residents receiving tickets for traffic violations. How do I know this? Well, I’ve heard from a few of you about your tickets. Some with chagrined humor that you can and should do better, some with a protest that you did not do what the ticket said or perhaps that your violation really wasn’t that bad or that important a traffic law. A few suggested it must be ticket quota time or that the police must need extra budget money. Please let me assure you that there are no such thing as ticket quota requirements in Bountiful and they are specifically prohibited by state law. The police department is part of the City’s general fund which means it is funded by tax dollars (largely property and sales tax). Ticket revenue is not a major funding source again thanks to limitations placed by state law, see 78A-7-120(7) and a report by the State Auditor showing compliance with the traffic citation revenue restrictions. I get it, no one likes getting a ticket and sometimes you want to tell someone that this particular experience was subpar. I can assure you that traffic enforcement is not the favorite of police officers either; some of you are less pleasant when being pulled over than you might otherwise be under different circumstances. I’m open to hearing from residents on all slices of their engagement with the city as there are always opportunities to do better, but by way of a general heads up, an outreach to me about your traffic ticket is NOT going to make the ticket go away. If you feel the officer got it wrong, your option is to appeal the ticket with the city prosecutor. 

In addition to stepped up traffic enforcement, we are also looking for ways to enhance our roads with street design features or signal improvements. The Traffic Safety Committee, which includes two council members as well as our police chief, city engineer, and director of our streets department has reviewed several traffic safety concerns and known issue spots and have made some recommendations for changes that have been adopted by the city council. Those changes include bigger and illuminated stop signs at the intersection of Bountiful Blvd/1800 South, enhanced crosswalks with flashing beacon signs at the crosswalks on 400 North/100 East (including a pedestrian refuge island), 500 South/200 East, 500 South/100 East and the Main Street mid-block crossings at approx. 150 South and 50 South (which would also have “zebra” stripping added to the crosswalk. Main Street will also have “25 MPH” speed limit signs painted on the road. You can find the staff reports and information for these different projects in the following meeting materials March 10, 2026 page 57, April 14, 2026page 43, and August 11, 2026 page 125. 

There are a few large-scale projects in the queue that will also have an impact on traffic safety including a planned traffic study of Orchard Drive and a feasibility study to create a South Davis Greenway. The Greenway project would be a separated pathway that would traverse North Salt Lake, Bountiful, Centerville and Farmington and provide a way for residence to walk, run, bike or otherwise roll along the pathway that is separated from traffic and provide for active transportation including where no sidewalks exist near Bolton Elementary. We have very robust mountain bike teams between our three area high schools, which means we have a lot more kids on bikes being mobile in our community which is an incredibly positive thing. There are also a lot more people of all ages using E-bikes as a commuting option or just to get around town (please always wear helmets and consult this handy website on the new state requirements for E-bikes/scooters and E-motorcycles). There’s plenty of room for all of us to get around in the way that works best for us, but it does mean we need to adjust some of how we interact when we’re in vehicles with others on the road and be mindful as a city in how we design and implement traffic control designs and measures. 

An example of what the rapid flashing beacon signals will look like

Fires & Fireworks

Now that we are past the July holidays and there has been some time to gather information and assess impacts related to the firework bans and the statewide fire situation, I wanted to report back on some elements and what is happening in this policy space. As a brief recap, in Utah firework discharge is allowed for two July summer holidays Independence Day and Pioneer Day. This year with extreme drought conditions and fire risk Governor Spencer Cox and the Utah State Forester Jamie Barnes issued additional orders limiting the discharge of fireworks to preserve firefighter resources. The orders were different for each holiday. The Independence Day order was a blanket firework ban that municipalities could “opt-out” of. The Pioneer Day order was slightly different and utilized an “opt-in” approach for firework bans. Each order rested the decision with the mayor and fire chief for each municipality given the condensed decision-making window. In consultation with Chief Larsen and after seeking the feedback of the city council and surrounding cities in our fire district, I made the decision to ban firework discharge within Bountiful for both holidays. According to survey data from the Utah League of Cities & Towns (ULCT) 64% of cities opted to ban fireworks for Independence Day and 52% for Pioneer Day. Of the cities that opted not to ban, 17% decided to modify their firework discharge maps to make them more conservative for Independence Day and 13% modified the maps for Pioneer Day. 

It has been a rough year for wildfires in the western states and in Utah we’ve broken the prior state record for wooded and forested acres burned in a single year. As of today, the stat’s available on the State’s Fire info website are grim with 1,055 fires that have consumed 559,225 acres.  Of the total number of fires, 458 have been human caused and 14 new fires have started in the past 24-hours. Firefighters have lost their lives this season and our fellow Utahns in central Utah have paid a heavy price this year due to the fires with the town of Beaver being a sad posterchild experiencing hundreds of millions of dollars in damage to roads, utilities, and buildings thanks to burn scar flooding. In Bountiful, despite the firework ban, we did have two minor fire started by fireworks and one by burning trash during July, but have otherwise been lucky to avoid major issues. Bountiful was impacted by the Rock Canyon fire in Morgan County which destroyed 90 of our power poles on the line that bring the energy from the 4.5 MW Echo Dam Hydroelectric Project over the mountain to Bountiful. That effectively means we cannot move or take power from that project until the line is repaired or we find an alternate power transmission route on a different powerline. Repair costs and alternate powerlines routes are beginning compiled by city staff and will then be evaluated by the Power Commission and City Council. This is a wildfire impact that will hit our rates even though the fire was outside our boundaries. We have other power sources in our power portfolio, but this impact may wrap into next summer’s power season. 

Part of the Governor’s reasoning on his orders was to avoid a potential segment of new fire starts while all heavy resources were committed to significant wildfires in southern and central Utah. This was also a significant part of my considerations on the decision I made for Bountiful. It is true that many fires start from causes other than fireworks, but once a fire starts, its origin is less important, the resources to put it out are what matter and this effort was about being smart during a period of high risk and limited resources. The effort worked as according to the ULCT survey data, a majority of cities overall reported experiencing fewer firework-related calls for service (69% for July 4 and 63% for July 24). For those cities that utilized a full ban, the firework-related call for service declines were even higher at 84% for July 4^th and 80% for July 24th.

While heavy resources were deployed to wildfires in other parts of the state, it left the Wasatch Front largely dependent on a system of mutual aid between fire agencies to assist each other. Unless you’ve served in local government, you might not be aware of the mutual aid that flexibly helps move resources and personnel to respond to emergencies between cities. It is one of the things that makes me very proud to serve at this level of government because help just comes when needed without politics. As a city, we’ve received help when needed and we’ve provided it to others. As long-time readers know, I’m a bit of a Lord of the Rings nerd, and the best way I can describe what it feels like in an emergency to know help is coming to the rescue is encapsulated in the line shouted by Aagorn, “Gondor calls for aid!” and King Theoden’s response, “And Rohan will answer!” (the Battle of Helm’s Deep is a good representation of the feeling too).  As the President of the ULCT this year, I was heavily engaged in discussions and considerations about the overall fire situation and firework ban discussion, particularly as the Governor weighed options for Pioneer Day. One of the pieces of information we were able to share with the Governor’s team was how many cities were sending mutual aid resources to the big fires burning at the time (Iron, Cottonwood, Babylon) or to other smaller regional fires. Nearly 41% of surveyed cities were sending resources to help. With heavy fire resources all deployed and utilized, northern Utah cities were largely left to their own defense with no expectation of statewide resources being available, yet these same cities still sent mutual aid to help on the big fires in addition to deploying mutual aid to neighboring areas as fires or other emergency needs emerged. South Davis Metro Fire has two wildland crews and they were deployed to assist in the Rock Canyon fire along with the new-to-us water tender truck. Our mobile command center vehicle was deployed to Millard County to assist with communications for fires down there and a few individual firefighters took deployments to go to attach to various units to fight wildfires including one who went to Washington State to assist there.  

It was an extraordinary month during an extraordinary summer in a dangerous fire season that is still playing out. I want to thank the residents of Bountiful for helping be part of the firework solution to preserve resources and I want to thank our firefighters and their families for being part of a mutual aid system that provided help when it was called for. I know that my decision to ban fireworks disrupted plans and long celebrated family traditions. I recognize we missed a major firework celebration opportunity with America250 and that firework retailers were financially impacted by the sudden turn of events. For that I’m sorry and wish circumstances had been different. For the most part, residents understood and accepted the decision with grace and the resilience to pivot to other celebration and gathering opportunities. Serving in local government often means I only hear from people when they are upset (see note on traffic tickets above LOL!). This was a rare instance in my 8-years of elected service where I received notes from residents thanking me for taking this action. I think we were all pretty worried about the dry conditions, concerned about the risk to our beloved mountainside, and protective of our community. You all took seriously the assignment to reduce risk, preserve resources, and go help others. Thank you.    

This state-wide experience has opened policy discussions with legislators on what might change in state law related to fireworks and municipal authority going forward. I expect there to be legislation on this in the 2027 legislative session and I will be advocating that cities need more tools in our toolbox to deal with extreme drought conditions and fire risk. As the level of government on the frontlines of firefighting, we need more and better tools. While I supported and used the Governor’s orders as mayor, it was a chaotic experience for all involved. More thoughtful timelines for decision making and finalizing restriction area maps, decision making that better involves city councils and communities, and better communication plans are all high on my radar for improvement. Other topics I expect to be discussed this fall for potential legislative inclusion are: greater regulatory autonomy related to firework discharge for cities especially during extreme drought conditions or limited firefighting resource conditions, shortened firework discharge dates/windows, and a review of which fireworks are included in the “Class C” definition. If this is a topic where you also want to see change, I highly suggest sharing your thoughts with our Bountiful area legislators. Permanent change and improvement can only come at the legislative level via a bill, otherwise the tools left to the Governor and Mayors is a clunky repeat of the emergency orders situation.  I’ll provide more updates on this policy space as the discussions evolve this fall and during the legislative session. In the meantime, fire season is not over. Please be safe and thoughtful when you are in fire risk areas.

Engine 384, staffed with Captain Kettle, Firefighter Bennett Lloyd, and Firefighter Tim Roberts just before they headed to the Rocky Canyon Fire.

Don't forget to check in on the City website for council meeting agendas and the latest City information. I also highly encourage signing up for the City's E-Newsletter that goes out twice a month and following Bountiful City on social media.

If you are in need of help or have questions that I can assist in answering, you can reach me at 801-599-9017 or email me at my city email kbradshaw@bountiful.gov or my personal email KateforBountifulCity@gmail.com. Thanks for reading and allowing me to represent you. I hope this newsletter was informative and helpful, please feel free to share it with neighbors that might not receive it directly or you can always find the newsletter on my Facebook page too. Please feel free to contact me if you would like to share a concern, have an idea for a policy improvement, or need help navigating City services. I'll do my best to assist.

-Kate

Paid for by Kate Bradshaw. Not produced or distributed at taxpayer expense.

Entirely written by Kate Bradshaw, especially the typos.

Kate Bradshaw Contact info:

KBradshaw@Bountiful.gov

KateforBountifulCity@gmail.com

Mobile: 801-599-9017

Facebook Instagram Campaign Website Donate to Kate

Kate Bradshaw serves as Bountiful's Mayor. She first joined the Bountiful City Council in November 2018 to fill a mid-term vacancy. She won city-wide re-election in a 2019 and again in 2023 to the Bountiful City Council before again winning election in 2025 and taking office as Mayor. The views expressed in this newsletter are her own.