MANTI—Motorists who use Pine Creek Road near Mt. Pleasant and want to drive faster than 35 mph will have to continue to break the law to do it.

            “No” was the answer from Sanpete County commissioners when Barry Bezzant and Russ Gardner, residents in the area serviced by the road, requested an increased speed limit on the road during a commission meeting Feb. 18.

            The road begins at the southeast corner of Mt. Pleasant and goes southwest for 6 miles before terminating at the Whispering Pines subdivision, where Gardner lives. It also serves Pine Creek Ranch (where Bezzant has a home), the Pine Mountain and Twin Oaks subdivisions, the KOA and Heritage Grove campgrounds and Oxbow Academy. The same road branches off to the Tifie Boy Scout camp.

            The commissioners had a “no” at the ready. “This has come up before, the speed limit. This is not a new item,” Commissioner Scott Bartholomew said.

            In October 2023, the commission received a similar request from a number of residents in the Twin Oaks subdivision, where most of the residents are members of the fundamentalist group, the Apostolic United Brethren (AUB).
            According to the written minutes of that meeting, their spokesperson, Mike Bowles, made the same request Bezzant did, to increase the speed limit on Pine Creek Road by 5 mph.

            At that time, Commissioner Reed Hatch said the speed limit had been lowered because of complaints about speeding from those same Twin Oaks residents.

            Bowles responded that resident complaints had been in regard to the 25-mph section of the road through their community. People had wanted more patrolling in the neighborhood, not necessarily a lower speed limit along higher-speed portions of the road.

            According to the minutes, Bowles said the deputy issuing tickets would sit at the end of a long stretch of the road to ticket drivers but “has not once patrolled the Twin Oaks community to slow the drivers down where it is needed.”

            That was at least part of what had led Bowles earlier to contact the sheriff’s office “to report the appearance of targeting the residents in their community…,” according to the minutes.
            The minutes contain no mention of a response to that issue, and no such charge was made during last month’s meeting with Bezzant.

            At last month’s meeting, Tom Seely, director of the Road Department, confessed to an “oops” moment, perhaps humorous in hindsight, that contributed to the need for such a road study and the current speed limit.

            Because of requests coming out of Twin Oaks, he decided to change the speed limit. But when he looked for speed-limit signs in the Road Department’s shop, he saw only signs reading “30 mph,” so that’s what he put up.          

            He didn’t know at that point that he couldn’t do that.

            “I was told that I can’t do that on my prerogative,” he said. “And there had to be a traffic study.”

            That’s when the county asked the engineering firm, Jones and DeMille, to perform the study, which considered things like road geometry (width, shoulder width, shape, slope, etc.) traffic flow (volume, intersections, etc.), visibility and other environmental factors, adjacent-land use and non-vehicular use (pedestrians, bicyclists, etc).

            “You’ve got no room for pedestrians. You’ve got no room if somebody has something wrong,” Seeley said at last month’s commission meeting. While the road, as the only access to a number of subdivisions, carries a lot of traffic, “it’s not an ideal road.”

            That’s why the county is considering building another road leading west out of the area, rather than widening Pine Creek Road to accommodate greater speeds, one of Bezzant’s suggestions.

            “That fixes the road,” Commissioner Scott Collard said, “but it doesn’t fix if there’s a fire or something [and] you need to get out.”

            It had happened once already. “They had a fire, and for three hours [the road was] shut down and 150 cars stopped and couldn’t get through,” Seely said.

            Gardner said he thought a higher speed limit would actually be safer.

            “From my personal views, it is a dangerous road. And the most dangerous part of it is [that] if you go 35, everybody passes you, and that becomes more dangerous than if they kept it at the 40 (mph), which originally it was,” he said.

            But Collard said the county couldn’t just brush off the road study. “What’s going to happen to us because …. you guys want 40 [mph], so we just say, ‘Okay, let’s make it 40?'” he asked.

            The answer was that if someone was to wreck knowing the county had disregarded the study, it could leave the county—and “everybody that pays taxes”—wide open to liability, Collard said.

            But Bezzant had another, perhaps more personal concern. Although he accepted responsibility for breaking the law and getting a ticket, it still smarted a little after 47 years of ticket-free driving.

            Couldn’t the officer, Deputy Lisle Farnum, he asked, have exercised some discretion, or are sheriff’s deputies required to issue tickets in all cases.

            When he went to court, he said, he spoke with other people there for traffic violations. “There were a total of seven of us,” he said, “all pulled over by Officer Farnham…Same thing, no warning, nothing. I just felt as I talked to these seven individuals that there was something wrong there.”

            Sheriff Jared Buchanan said that he allows deputies to use discretion, but he tells them to do their jobs, period.

            “I don’t tell them to go write tickets. I expect them to do their job,” he said, adding he doesn’t issue goals, quotas or give rewards for tickets, and that he tells the county and cities  patrolled by the Sheriff’s Office not to base any of their budgets on revenue from tickets.

            “In my opinion, law enforcement should not make money. I don’t think our job is to go out and tax the citizens. Our job is public safety.”

            Bezzant took the responses to his concerns graciously, leading Commissioner Bartholomew to say, and Collard to agree, “You know, we hear a lot of people coming in here before us. You’re one of the most respectful persons that’s come before us in this type of  capacity. Thank you.”