The wires Kaysville
A town that bought its electric system outright, on the condition that City Hall never went dark
City power since 1908, and the network the town voted down.
On 1 March 1908 Kaysville signed a franchise for the electric system a private company had installed here in 1900, on three conditions, one of which was constant power to City Hall. On 8 June 1908 it bought all rights for 1,850 dollars. It has run the utility ever since, billing 10,364 customers on its own 2021 figures with exactly one industrial account among them. In November 2020 the same town was asked whether it wanted to own its fiber too, and said no by 285 votes on the county canvass.
Southern Utah is the ground I actually work, several hours south of Davis County, so these pages are researched rather than lived. What is on them was read where it is published: five National Register nomination files for Kaysville buildings, the city's own power presentation filed as a public notice document, the Davis County Clerk's canvassed 2020 election report, the county recorder's parcel layer and two independent boundary authorities, Utah State University's own posted rules for its botanical campus, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's failed bank record. Every figure carries the date it was checked. A Davis County partner agent takes the ground level work.
The live question
Does Kaysville really run its own power, and what does that actually change for a household?
It does, and the paperwork is unusually specific about how it started. Checked on 15 August 2026: Kaysville City operates its own electric department out of 721 West Old Mill Lane, and the city's own presentation on the utility records that power was first installed here in 1900 by private parties, that the town signed a franchise agreement for the system on 1 March 1908, and that on 8 June 1908 Kaysville "officially bought all rights for $1,850.00". The town did not build a utility from nothing. It bought one, cheaply, and then spent more than the purchase price on transformers two months later.
What it changes for a household is narrower than the reputation suggests, and it is worth being precise because the reputation is doing a lot of work in local conversation. Power, culinary water, sewer, storm drain and rubbish collection all arrive on one consolidated Kaysville City utility bill; natural gas does not, and the city names Enbridge Gas Utah as the separate provider. The department keeps municipal hours rather than call centre hours, Monday to Thursday from seven in the morning until four and Friday from seven until noon. Those are the real, checkable differences. Everything past that is not printable here for a specific reason set out below.
The reason is that no current published comparison exists. The city writes, in its own words, that as a municipal utility it "does not collect a return on capital for investors and is not subject to income taxes," and that "these two items alone provide a significant cost benefit when compared to an investor owned utility." That is the city describing its own structure and it is quoted here as exactly that. This page does not say that Kaysville power is cheaper, or more reliable, or quicker to restore after a storm, because nothing published on 15 August 2026 supports any of those three, and a relocation page that repeats them is guessing on somebody else's behalf.
The utility, in the city's own numbers
$1,850
paid for all rights on 8 June 1908
10,364
customers billed, per the city's 2021 figures
17
employees, per the same 2021 presentation
285
the canvassed margin against the 2020 fiber bond
1908
Three conditions, one of which was that the lights at City Hall never go out.
The franchise agreement of 1 March 1908 carried three stipulations and the city still prints all three. Constant power would be provided to City Hall. The power provided would be for lighting only. And energy costs to customers were not to exceed fifteen cents per kilowatt hour. Read them in order and you can see a small town working out what electricity was for in 1908: it was for light, it was for the building where the town's business got done, and it was to be sold at a ceiling the town set itself. Nothing about heat, nothing about motors, nothing about the hundred other things a wire would eventually carry.
The rest of that year runs like a project plan. On 8 June the town bought all rights for 1,850 dollars. On 3 August it took out a loan of 3,000 dollars to buy transformers, which is to say the equipment needed to make the system usable cost roughly one and two thirds times what the system itself had cost. And on 5 November the council met about metering and the disconnection of power. Eight months from signing a franchise to arguing about meters and shutoffs, which is about the pace anybody who has ever run a small utility would recognise.
That sequence is a correction rather than a contradiction of what the practical city guide says. The guide dates the utility to March 1908 and it is not wrong. The precise version is that March 1908 is the franchise and June 1908 is the purchase, and the purchase is the one with a number attached to it. A page that prints 1,850 dollars and 8 June is telling a reader something they cannot get anywhere else, and it came off a document the city filed itself.
One small detail is worth keeping because of what sits three streets away. The National Register nomination for the Henry H. Blood house, a large Queen Anne place begun around 1896 at 95 South 300 West, records early sconces and girandoles for electric lights in the interior, possibly not original. So there is a Kaysville house from the 1890s carrying early electric fixtures, in the town that bought its own electric system in 1908. Those are two separate facts and this page states them as two separate facts rather than drawing a line between them, because nothing published connects the two.
The details
Getting there
There is no visit to make. The power department shares a yard with the parks crews on Old Mill Lane on the west side of town, and the front counter for a utility account is at City Hall on Center Street. The useful destination for this subject is a document rather than a building: the city's own presentation on its power and light department is a public notice file and it takes about twenty minutes to read properly. If you are setting up service rather than reading history, the phone number on the department page is 801-544-8925.
Before you go
- Every operating figure below is 2021 data. Ask the city for the current customer count and sales figure rather than repeating a five year old number as though it were this year's.
- Ask, at a specific address, whether pressurised secondary irrigation is part of the arrangement. It is common in Davis County and the provider varies by parcel.
- Natural gas is billed separately by Enbridge Gas Utah and is not on the city bill. That is one more account than a household moving from a single utility town expects.
- The rebate amounts below were current to the city's 2021 presentation. Confirm every one at the power department before buying an appliance on the strength of it.
The utility now
Ten thousand meters, seventeen people and exactly one industrial account.
The city's presentation gives a customer breakdown that says more about the shape of Kaysville than any land use table would. The total is 10,364 customers, made up of 9,450 residential accounts, 851 commercial accounts, 62 city owned accounts that are net billed, and one industrial account. A city of nearly thirty three thousand people has a single industrial customer on its own grid. That is the clearest available evidence that this is a residential and institutional town rather than a working one, and it comes from the utility's own billing system rather than from an economic development brochure.
The rest of the operating picture is small and legible. Seventeen employees. A grid covering over 10.5 square miles, which is effectively the city. Total sales of 164,667,014 kilowatt hours in 2021. And a claim the city makes for itself, which is reliability awards for 2018 to 2021 placing it in the top quarter nationally; the slide does not name the awarding body, so this page prints the claim as the city's own with the years attached and goes no further. The city buys wholesale power through the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems, a nonprofit interlocal agency, and that agency's membership count has not been verified, so no number for it appears here.
The department runs its own appliance rebate programmes and names them: Home Energy Savings, Cool Cash and See Ya Later Refrigerator. The published amounts as of the 2021 presentation ran from ten dollars for lighting fixtures and twenty dollars for a dishwasher, freezer or room air conditioner, through fifty dollars for a clothes washer, portable evaporative cooler or electric water heater, to one hundred dollars for a refrigerator, and on the heating and cooling side from twenty five dollars for a smart thermostat up to four hundred dollars for an evaporative cooler or heat pump, with a hundred to two hundred dollars for central air depending on efficiency rating. Thirty dollars for recycling an old refrigerator. Every one of those figures is five years old and must be confirmed at the department before anybody spends money on the strength of it.
The projects list in that presentation is the part that ages fastest and it is printed here as what it is, a snapshot of what the department said it was doing in 2021. Named as current: a rebuild on Main Street at the technical college, new build subdivisions at Westgate, Talbot and Orchard Ridge, a line transfer with the investor owned utility along the rebuilt US-89, and switch installation on main feeder lines. Named as near future: a Schick substation, work on the 2400 system, upsized feeder wire, rerouting and construction of power lines for the West Davis Corridor, a long range study plan and a rebuild of King Clarion. Announced is not built, and none of those should be repeated as complete without a check at the city.
| Where the electricity came from | Share in 2021 | What that resource is | What to know about it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Natural gas, Payson Project | 38% | The city's largest single share, from a gas fired project | A generation share, not a bill share. Fuel mix and price are different questions and the city publishes only the first |
| Coal, Hunter and San Juan | 32% | Two Utah and New Mexico coal plants that municipal systems across the west have held stakes in | Coal shares across the region have been changing for years. A 2021 figure is not a 2026 figure and should not be read as one |
| Wind, HBW and PVW | 14% | Two wind resources named by initials on the city's own slide | The slide does not expand the abbreviations, so this page does not guess at them |
| Hydro, CRSP and Olmstead | 5% | Colorado River Storage Project allocation plus the Olmstead plant in Utah County | Hydro output moves with water years, so a percentage in a dry year and a wet year are not the same number |
| Heat recovery, Veyo | 2% | A waste heat recovery resource in Washington County, southern Utah | The smallest named share and the most unusual one to see on a municipal slide |
| Pool purchases and sales | 10% | Market activity through the city's wholesale agency | This is the balancing line rather than a physical resource, and it is what makes the other rows move year to year |
All six shares are from the city's own presentation, Kaysville City Power and Light, Est. March 1908, filed on the Utah Public Notice Website and checked in August 2026. The same slide gives a twelve month average renewable share of 20 per cent for 2021. Every figure in this table carries a 2021 date and none of it is a statement about what a Kaysville household is buying today. Almost no Utah city publishes where its electrons come from by percentage at all, which is why it is here, but a five year old fuel mix printed without its year reads as current and is not.
2020
The same instinct, asked again, and answered the other way by 285 votes.
A town that bought a utility in 1908 put the twenty first century version of the same question on the ballot in 2020, and turned it down. The numbers below are the county's canvassed official results, which are not the numbers in circulation, and getting them right matters because the margin is the whole story.
The sequence, as far as it can be established: the city council voted in 2019 to create a municipal fiber utility, opponents gathered referendum signatures, and the question went to voters on 3 November 2020. Newspaper coverage at the time described it as a thirty year bond of around 22 million dollars for a citywide network. That dollar figure and that term are newspaper sourced rather than issuer sourced, and they are printed here with that label attached; the county's official report gives only the ballot title.
The result is issuer sourced and it is precise. The Davis County Clerk's Summary Results Report, Official Results, 2020 General Election, checked in August 2026, records the ballot title as "OFFICIAL BALLOT PROPOSITION FOR THE KAYSVILLE CITY, UTAH SPECIAL BOND ELECTION" and gives 8,855 against at 50.82 per cent and 8,570 for at 49.18 per cent, on 17,425 total votes cast. The margin is 285.
The numbers that circulate widely, including on the practical city guide, are 8,712 against to 8,438 for and a margin of 274. Those are pre canvass counts. The percentages in both versions are identical at 50.82 to 49.18, which is exactly why the wrong pair survived: it looks right against the published percentage. If you see 274 anywhere, including on this site, it is the unofficial number and the canvassed margin is 285.
The context in the same official report is worth a line, because it changes how decisive that margin reads. Davis County had 192,849 registered voters that year, cast 174,544 ballots, and turned out at 90.51 per cent. Kaysville settled its fiber question in the highest turnout election the county has run, which means the 285 votes were not a thin turnout artefact. Two other Davis County bond questions sat on the same report and both also failed, including a Bountiful parks and trails bond that went down 9,191 to 5,492.
What replaced it is private. The city's utility page lists CenturyLink, Comcast, Rise Broadband and Connext as the providers serving Kaysville, a list that was accurate on 15 August 2026 and that changes without notice. No page on this site will tell you what speed is available at a specific address; that is an address level question and the only reliable answer comes from the providers themselves against a real service address.
Every operating number on this page is 2021 data from a single city presentation, and the rebate amounts are five years old. The customer count of 10,364, the seventeen employees, the 164,667,014 kilowatt hours, the six resource shares and the whole rebate schedule all come from one document, Kaysville City Power and Light, Est. March 1908, filed on the Utah Public Notice Website as file 845057 and checked in August 2026. It is the most detailed thing the city has published about its own utility and it is also the only one, which means there is no newer set to check it against. Treat every figure as a 2021 figure, ask the department for current numbers before relying on any of them, and do not let a fuel mix or a rebate amount from 2021 be read as this year's. The department is on 801-544-8925 and its own page carries an annual power report and a long range reliability study.
Living with it
One bill for most of it, a separate one for gas, and a counter that shuts at noon on Friday.
The practical version of all this fits in a paragraph. Power, culinary water, sewer, storm drain and garbage arrive together on a Kaysville City utility bill. Natural gas is billed separately by Enbridge Gas Utah. Internet is private and there are four named providers. Pressurised secondary irrigation is common in this county and the arrangement varies by parcel, so the honest instruction for a specific address is to have the city confirm the water and sewer setup at that parcel before closing rather than assuming the street's answer applies. The city's utilities pages are the place to start and the counter at 23 East Center Street is the place to finish.
The hours are a real fact rather than a curiosity. The power department runs Monday to Thursday from seven until four and Friday from seven until noon, and the recreation office runs Monday to Thursday nine to five and Friday nine to one. A four and a half day municipal week is not unusual in small Utah cities and it is one of the things that quietly reshapes a first month here: anything needing a person rather than a portal has a narrower window than a newcomer expects, and Friday afternoon is not in it.
One thing this page deliberately leaves alone. Whether the city or the investor owned alternative is better value is a question with no published answer, and both halves of the local argument tend to be asserted rather than sourced. The city's own claim is about structure, which is a real thing to say: no investor return, no income tax liability. What that does to a specific bill in a specific month is not published and is not guessed at here. If it matters to your decision, ask the city for a current rate schedule from the municipal code and read it yourself.
The other half of an address here, the part about what a house costs and what sells, belongs on the practical Kaysville city guide rather than on this companion, and the rest of what an address in this city asks of a household is on the mover page.
The other city building
The Rock Building
New Deal money and a 25 year old mayor built it. It has been empty since 2015 and it is still the last of its kind standing in this county.
Read the guideMoving here
Moving to Kaysville
Two freeway doors on one street, no train platform, one consolidated bill and a boundary lesson at the south end of Main.
The mover pageThe other municipal town
A city that runs itself
Bountiful runs power, water, a dump and a fiber network it actually built, which is the comparison Kaysville's 2020 vote sits against.
Read the guideThe same three blocks
The man who built Kaysville
The Main Street the utility was wired along, the family that banked it, and the mason who built most of what is still standing.
Read the guideThe practical side
The Kaysville city guide
The other half of an address here: what sells, what it runs to, who bills you and what the schools are.
Open the guideThe wider county
Davis County on The Local
Fourteen more towns on this bench and the seven subjects written once for all of them.
The region hubKeep reading
More of Kaysville on The Local.
The bench park
East Mountain Wilderness Park
One hundred and forty acres, tent sites you walk into, and the one gate a dog may use.
Read the guideThe empty one
The Rock Building
A mayor of twenty five, New Deal money, and a stone building empty since 2015.
Read the guideThe university's
The Utah Botanical Center
A university campus with stocked ponds, free every day, reached from the wrong exit.
Read the guideBy correspondence
The man who built Kaysville
He learned architecture by post and built four of the six listed places in town.
Read the guideOne big week
The Fourth of July
Seven days at the end of June, and the town does not pretend to a second week.
Read the guideMoving here
Moving to Kaysville
The postmark says one city and the parcel can say another. Read the parcel.
Read the guideThe companion
Kaysville, in full
Wires from 1908, a bench park, a New Deal building, a university campus and one week.
Read the pageQuick answers
City power, answered.
Yes. Kaysville City runs its own electric department out of 721 West Old Mill Lane, and it has since 1908. The city's own presentation on the utility records that power was first installed in Kaysville in 1900 by private parties, that the town signed a franchise agreement for the system on 1 March 1908, and that on 8 June 1908 it bought all rights for 1,850 dollars. On the city's 2021 figures the department served 10,364 customers with seventeen employees across a grid covering over 10.5 square miles. Power, water, sewer, storm drain and garbage arrive on one consolidated city bill.
Three, and the city still prints all of them. Constant power would be provided to City Hall. The power provided would be for lighting only. And energy costs to customers would not exceed fifteen cents per kilowatt hour. The rest of 1908 followed quickly: the town bought all rights on 8 June for 1,850 dollars, took a 3,000 dollar loan on 3 August to buy transformers, which cost more than the system itself had, and by 5 November the council was meeting about metering and the disconnection of power.
There is no published comparison, so this page will not say. What the city says about itself is that as a municipal utility it does not collect a return on capital for investors and is not subject to income taxes, and that those two items alone provide a significant cost benefit compared with an investor owned utility. That is the city describing its own structure and it is quoted here as exactly that. No current rate or reliability comparison between the two was found on 15 August 2026, so no claim about price, reliability or restoration times appears anywhere on this companion. Rates are set in the municipal code and the city will provide the current schedule.
By the city's own 2021 accounting: natural gas from the Payson Project at 38 per cent, coal from Hunter and San Juan at 32 per cent, wind at 14 per cent, hydro from the Colorado River Storage Project and Olmstead at 5 per cent, heat recovery at Veyo in southern Utah at 2 per cent, and pool purchases and sales through the city's wholesale agency at 10 per cent. The same slide gives a twelve month average renewable share of 20 per cent for 2021. Every one of those figures is a 2021 figure from a single city presentation and should not be read as current. The city buys wholesale power through the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems.
This page will not explain why anyone voted the way they did, but the result is precise. The city council voted in 2019 to create a municipal fiber utility, opponents gathered referendum signatures, and the question went to the ballot on 3 November 2020. The Davis County Clerk's official canvassed results record 8,855 against at 50.82 per cent and 8,570 for at 49.18 per cent, on 17,425 votes cast, a margin of 285. Newspaper coverage at the time described a thirty year bond of about 22 million dollars, and those two figures are newspaper sourced rather than issuer sourced.
No. The 8,712 to 8,438 count and the 274 vote margin that circulate widely, including on this site's own practical city guide, are unofficial pre canvass numbers. The Davis County Clerk's Summary Results Report, Official Results, 2020 General Election gives 8,855 against to 8,570 for, a margin of 285. The percentages are identical in both versions at 50.82 to 49.18, which is exactly why the wrong pair survived so long. The canvassed report is the one to cite.
Private providers, because the municipal network was not built. The city's utility page named CenturyLink, Comcast, Rise Broadband and Connext when it was checked in August 2026, and that list changes without notice. What is available at a specific street address is an address level question that only the providers can answer against a real service address, and no page on this site will promise a speed at a door. Re-check the city's list every six months and treat any speed claim attached to a listing as something to verify before it matters.
Water yes, gas no. Power, culinary water, sewer, storm drain and garbage collection all arrive on one consolidated Kaysville City utility bill. Natural gas is billed separately and the city names Enbridge Gas Utah, formerly Dominion Energy Utah and Questar, as the provider. Pressurised secondary irrigation is common across Davis County and the arrangement varies by parcel, so the sensible move at a specific address is to have the city confirm the water and sewer arrangement for that parcel rather than assume it matches the street.
The department runs its own programmes, named Home Energy Savings, Cool Cash and See Ya Later Refrigerator, and the amounts published in the city's 2021 presentation ran from ten dollars for lighting fixtures up to four hundred dollars for an evaporative cooler or heat pump, with a refrigerator at one hundred dollars, a clothes washer or electric water heater at fifty, a smart thermostat at twenty five and thirty dollars for recycling an old refrigerator. Those figures are five years old. Confirm every amount with the power department on 801-544-8925 before buying anything on the strength of them.
A city that bought its wires and then declined to buy its cables.
The utility story is one of the few things about Kaysville that is exactly what it looks like, and it is also the thing most likely to be over interpreted in a local conversation. What it really means for a household is a shorter list than the reputation suggests: one consolidated bill, a separate gas account, a counter that closes at noon on Friday, and an irrigation arrangement that has to be checked parcel by parcel rather than street by street. If you are weighing an address here, tell me what matters and I will introduce you to a Davis County partner agent who works these streets, and stay on the file for the financing side.
Referral disclosure. Outside Southern Utah, I connect home sellers and buyers with partner agents I trust in their area. If you choose to work with an agent I refer, that agent's brokerage pays my brokerage (Real Broker, LLC) a referral fee. The fee comes out of the agent's compensation; it is not an added cost to you. You are always free to choose any agent you wish, and using a referred agent is never required.