The "No Tax Increase Since 2010" City Was Sending $10–15 Million a Year to Redevelopment Areas Before the Rate Ever Moved

1. The Rate That Stayed Flat

Eagle Mountain's certified property-tax rate sat near 0.00053–0.00056 for years before 2026's Resolution R-62-2026 (covered in the companion referendum case file). The city's own documents don't agree on exactly how long: its FY2023 and FY2024 audited financial reports say the rate hadn't gone through Truth in Taxation "since FY2005," while its FY2025 report and its own Truth-in-Taxation web page say "since 2010." That five-year discrepancy appears in the city's own official filings and is unresolved — worth a direct question to the Finance Department.

Table sourced to Eagle Mountain's own ACFRs (FY2022–FY2025) and its Aug. 2026 Truth-in-Taxation filing. Total taxable value was only confirmed for FY2022 ($4,028,518,573); later years' statistical tables could not be retrieved in this research pass — see What's Missing.

2. Where General Fund Money Actually Comes From

The General Fund's own revenue statement doesn't break "Taxes" into property vs. sales vs. franchise — that split only shows up at the city-wide (all-funds) level. Both views matter for different reasons, so both are shown here.

3. The Gap Between "City-Wide" and "General Fund"

This is the central finding of this piece. Eagle Mountain's audited financial statements report two totals each year that belong side by side: the city's total tax revenue across every fund (property, sales and franchise tax together), and the property tax that specifically lands in the Redevelopment Agency (RDA) Fund — increment captured from CRA/RDA project areas before it reaches the General Fund. The RDA amount is property tax the General Fund, Alpine School District, the water district, and the fire service never see.

How it works: where a property-tax dollar goes, depending on whether the property sits inside a project area.

flowchart TD
  A["Owner pays
property tax"] --> B{"Inside a CRA/RDA
project area?"}
  B -- "No, or the
base-year part" --> C["Normal split:
city General Fund,
schools, water, fire"]
  B -- "Yes: growth
since base year" --> H["City RDA Fund
$10.46M FY2024
$15.03M FY2025"]

FY2025 in one picture: the city's total "Taxes" line, split between the two funds that received it.

flowchart TD
  T["All city taxes
FY2025: $37.53M"] --> GF["General Fund
and other:
about 60%"]
  T --> R["RDA Fund:
$15.03M,
about 40%"]

An independent cross-check

Utah County's own Report 700 for tax year 2023 — a separate, county-administered accounting, not produced by Eagle Mountain itself — sums the increment captured by all taxing entities (city, Alpine School District, Central Utah Water Conservancy District, fire service) across Eagle Mountain's five known project areas to roughly $10.44 million for that tax year. That lines up closely with the ACFR's $10,457,606 RDA Fund figure for the following fiscal year — independent corroboration from a different government office, using a different accounting method, of the same order of magnitude.

4. The Five Known Project Areas

These are the CRA/RDA project areas identified in Utah County Auditor's 2023 Report 700 for Eagle Mountain. Figures are tax-year 2023, the only year located in this research pass.

Source: Utah County Auditor, 2023 Report 700 — Eagle Mountain. Sweetwater #1 and #1 Phase 2 alone account for over 93% of all increment captured across the five areas, driven largely by data-center development.

5. Risk Framework: What Kind of Exposure Is This?

Not every tax-increment mechanism carries the same kind of risk to city finances. Sorting them matters more than treating "there's a CRA" as an alarm by itself.

6. What's Missing — Said Plainly

• Report 700 for Eagle Mountain was only located for tax year 2023. 2022, 2024, and 2025 versions could not be found at the expected URL pattern, and the county's online redevelopment portal appears to require selecting the agency from a form rather than a direct link. Update, Oct. 1, 2026: the 2022 report was since located at a different address (linked in Sources); 2024 and 2025 are still not located.
• Each ACFR's statistical section — the 10-year tables of taxable value and tax rates that would settle the FY2023–FY2025 taxable-value question outright — exists in the table of contents but could not be retrieved in full.
• The actual text of Resolution R-62-2026 was not obtained directly; its terms are corroborated by the city's own Truth-in-Taxation page and independent reporting, but the source document itself should be requested from the City Recorder or pulled from the city's CivicClerk portal.
• "Sweetwater CRA #2" is referenced elsewhere but unconfirmed here.
• EMMA/MSRB bond disclosure filings for any Eagle Mountain or Eagle Mountain RDA bonds were not checked — this is the correct place to look to settle the Tier 3 question one way or the other.

People in this record

These are the public officials named in the city's own audited reports and public notices that this page relies on. Being listed here means only that a person's name and title appear on those documents. It does not mean they did anything wrong.

"None found" means a search of the Hive's own published case-file repositories on Oct. 1, 2026 turned up no other page naming that person. Officials' names were read from the reports' transmittal letters and lists of principal officials, by text extraction.

Questions Worth Asking

• Ask the Eagle Mountain Finance Department (Administrative Services Director): which is correct — that the rate hasn't gone through Truth in Taxation since 2005, or since 2010? The city's own audited reports say both in different years.
• Ask the Eagle Mountain RDA board or the Administrative Services Director: how does the RDA Fund's $10.46M (FY2024) / $15.03M (FY2025) tax revenue reconcile with Report 700's per-entity increment figures? Is the ACFR figure the sum captured across all taxing entities, or the city's own share plus something else?
• Ask the Eagle Mountain City Recorder's office: does "Sweetwater CRA #2" exist, and if so, what is its base year, term, and increment capture to date?
• Ask the Eagle Mountain Administrative Services Director or the City Attorney's office: is any city fund pledged, or does it serve as a fallback, for any CRA/RDA/PID-related bond currently outstanding?