In addition to picnic grounds and a disc golf course, American Fork's 22-acre Art Dye Park has served another role lately: garbage dump.

The city's street sweepers have been unloading gravel and other accumulated junk in the park because the city doesn't have the $250,000 it would take to haul it to a proper dump, Mayor Heber Thompson told the Daily Herald. With sales tax revenue about $350,000 under projections and new building permits falling short by about $140,000, it's just one of the ways the city is feeling the national economic slowdown, he said.

"In a better economic environment than we have, our plans for city projects and expenditures would be more aggressive," Thompson said. "We have pared that down."

The city has also had to put off plans for badly needed cemetery space, new roads and critical hires in several departments, including law enforcement, he said. And with relief depending on federal solutions that could take years to turn things around, one can only hope things won't get any worse before they get better, he said.

"I think economists do a good job of telling you what happened after the fact," Thompson said. "My gut feeling is that I think we'll see improvement in the economic situation."

American Fork's predicament is not unique: City administrators across Utah County are having to scale back projects and get creative to fund day-to-day operations, all while keeping an eye on the horizon for signs of positive change.

Best of times, worst of times

For several years, Utah's economy appeared isolated from the woes being suffered most other places. In 2006, the 5-percent annual job growth here left the national average of 1.6 percent in the dust. The state led the nation in home value appreciation at 17.55 percent -- more than three times the national rate. In the state's fastest-growing county, the Provo-Orem metropolitan area fared even better, seeing a 19.92-percent rise.

Things slowed in 2007, but most economists maintained a rosy outlook. Job growth slipped to 2.5 percent, but still outpaced the 0.8 percent nationally.

Most mayors said the first signs of trouble slipped into Happy Valley about eight months ago.

"You start to see more and more people not paying their property taxes; that's an indicator that we started to see," said Mayor Lewis Billings of Provo. "We started to see the number of building permits fall off, and that's an indicator."

In Orem, City Manager Jim Reams said he noticed sales tax revenue leveling off around the first of the year. That was especially alarming, because the city historically has relied more on that money and less on new building permits and other growth-related activity, he said.

"We've put a contingency plan in place identifying certain expenditures that we'll just hold on and watch the economy as it goes forward," Reams said.

One of those expenditures is a fourth fire station for the city. Reams said there had been plans to actively pursue its construction and opening, but the faltering cash flow has delayed those for the time being.

"We're still proceeding with some architectural work, but at the same time we're watching the economy before we put it out to bid," he said. "We just look at it on a month-by-month basis."

Cutting the fat

Shelving capital projects has not been the only way city administrators have sought to shore up their finances. Lehi announced plans to buy more economical cars for the city fleet and compartmentalize many services -- including its recreation center, literacy-training center and storm drains -- in the city budget to get a better idea of the costs and potential cost-saving measures within each.

Thompson said he will ask American Fork residents on November's ballots whether they want to fund several measures, including buying more cemetery land and completing the "famous unfinished" Art Dye Park, by taking out bonds. Since residents will share a heavy burden in repaying the bonds through taxes, they will get to choose which projects to fund, he said.

"It's going to be their choice," Thompson said. "That's how we're structuring it."

The City Council will also hold public hearings in the coming weeks to discuss a $38 annual property tax increase to pay for new positions the city needs to fill, like a code enforcement officer, a library technician and a parks employee. One critical position that will be filled either way is a part-time grant writer to help dig up other revenue sources, Thompson said.

"We think it will pay dividends in having us be on the list for more grants," he said.

In Provo, the budget Billings proposed in May cut out many benefits that city employees have enjoyed for years, including free health care and a cost-of-living adjustment. Billings argued that the skyrocketing cost of health care necessitated the move, but the Municipal Council restored some of the lost benefits in July after an outcry from the Employees Association.

Foggy future

Billings said he's concerned that funding employee health care could drive Provo into yet more dire fiscal circumstances when the time comes to prepare next year's budget, but he hopes that won't be the case.

It all depends on whether Utah County -- and by extension, the United States -- has seen the worst of this economic storm, he said.

"It's a difficult time. The economic cycle we're in is being influenced by factors we haven't seen probably since President Carter's time," Billings said. "The rapidly increasing price of oil -- that's causing the value of our dollar to be very weak, and that's changing our entire economy. Everything is starting to change."

Those factors can only be solved on the federal level, Billings said -- although it remains to be seen whether decision-makers there have the wherewithal to come up with an answer.

"If Washington would go to work and come up immediately with an interim plan and energy policy, I think you'd start to see some changing in some of these factors that we're facing," he said. "We're a country that can solve problems, but we're not doing it yet."

Thompson agreed, saying the influences on the local economy are too broad to be controlled by local governments. But Utah County has at least one thing going for it, he said.

"All these things are growth-related, and I think the growth is going to continue here."

• Ace Stryker can be reached at 344-2556 or at astryker@heraldextra.com.