People divided over possible townhomes replacing a historic Kaysville home

KAYSVILLE — It’s one of the most beautiful private properties in Kaysville. The house at 41 West and 100 South was built in the late 1800s and is well-known in the area.

“It has been in the family for over 110 years. I love it,” Ike Anderson said.

Anderson has lived in the home for several years. He’s also tired of it.

“It is getting very hard to keep this place up,” he said.

Anderson says his property taxes have doubled in recent years.

A new law requiring secondary water connections on all meters by 2030 means he won’t be able to water all the trees on his two-and-a-half acres.

It’s also just plain expensive to maintain an old house.

“I had to put in new sewer lines since I have been here. The old, what they call clay pipe, which is just tar paper wrapped around itself, I had to retrench that. There was also a culinary water line that burst. People don’t understand the amount of work it takes,” he said. “It is a lot of cost and it is a lot of time and effort.”

You can’t blame him for wanting to sell it all. But that is where the controversy begins.

A developer is offering him millions of dollars for the property.

First, though, Anderson would need Kaysville’s City Council to vote in favor of rezoning the property to allow for dozens of townhomes the developer would like to build.

Several neighbors have sent emails to the city saying they were against the re-zoning because of their concerns it would change the character of their neighborhood with increased people, traffic, and noise.

The Kaysville Planning Commission voted 3-1 in favor of the zoning change, but the matter is now up to the City Council.

“This is one of those that I am confident I am going to vote no for,” councilman John Adams said.

It’s not that Adams is against development, he just says, so far, he hasn’t seen any solid plans from the developer about what the project would look like and how big it would be.

“When you are going to change or rezone an area, for me it is so important that there are plans and that you meet with the neighbors,” Adams said. “There are obviously a lot of very upset neighbors, for good reasons. They bought their homes and they built their lives in an area that’s planned to be one thing and now somebody is saying lets change it.”

Adams says a lot has been to try and get more housing into the city but wonders if this type of project is the kind of affordable housing the city is trying to accomplish.

“We’re going to have to take a real good look at it,” he said.

The Barnes/Burton/Rampton Home is on Kaysville’s historic tour.

Anderson says he would be just fine selling to someone to keep it there, but so far, no one has matched the offer he says he has.

“We would love to see someone come in and buy it if they can match what a developer will pay,” Anderson said. “But unfortunately, no one has even come close to that.”

Correction: A previous headline said “apartments” instead of townhomes. It has since been corrected.