Court Opinion

ID: 9781985
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-30 17:47:33.812717+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:34:44.095907
License: Public Domain

*712ORME, Judge
(concurring in part, concurring in the result in part, and dissenting in part): ©
1 50 I concur in parts IA, 1B, and ID of the main opinion, and I concur in the result reached in part IC, although I do not agree with all of the analysis in that section. I also concur in part IIB. With respect to part IIA, I respectfully dissent.
4 51 I am not prepared to hold, as a matter of law, that the municipality's failure to do anything to improve the safety at the crossing was the product of a careful policy judgment made in the course of discretionary decision-making. On the contrary, there are indications in the record that over the course of many years, UDOT called the unsafe condition of the erossing to South Jordan's attention, repeatedly beseeched it to do something, and offered to help plan and fund the improvements. Rather than responding with thoughtful analysis of why such improvements would not, on balance, be in the city's best interest, there are indications the city simply dropped the ball, essentially ignoring UDOT's expressed concerns and doing nothing. This does not appear to be a situation where the city actually came to grips with the problem and made a rational decision to leave the crossing as it was for reasons deemed sound by the municipality after a thoughtful inquiry.1
52 I do not mean to suggest that, as a matter of law, the city did not have the protection offered by the discretionary function variant of the sovereign immunity doe-trine. I mean only to say that the record in this regard is such that summary resolution of the question was not proper. I would reverse the summary judgment with respect to this claim against the municipality and permit a factfinder to evaluate the competing evidence.

. Indeed, there is evidence that on one or more occasions over the last twenty years, the city even acknowledged the wisdom of installing gates and flashing lights at the crossing and was aware that federal funds would cover essentially all of the resulting expense.