Education
Does the Alpine School District split leave officials serving two masters?
Rob Shelton | Lehi Free Press
Julie King is leading two school boards. One is dying. The other is being born from its pieces.
She’s the board president of the Alpine School District (ASD), which dissolves in July 2027.
She’s also the board president of Lake Mountain School District, one of three new districts that will split up Alpine’s students, buildings and money when that day comes. Both boards elected King to lead them. Both expect her to fight for them. That arrangement sits at the center of the second installment in this newspaper’s series on conflicts of interest in local government, and it’s already drawn an on-record objection from one of King’s own colleagues on the ASD Board.
This is the part of a three-part series about conflicts of interest in local government. The first installment, published June 4, leaned on former Utah State Auditor John Dougall, who spent years auditing state and local government before leaving office in 2025.
Dougall advised that a conflict, real or perceived, doesn’t mean anyone did anything wrong. He made that point in the first installment, describing officials who drew scrutiny “not always from actual wrongdoing, but from the perception of it.”
“We all have conflicts,” Dougall said. “Some are greater than others.”
His advice for officials caught between overlapping duties was blunt. “Disclose more, not less, and do it publicly,” he said. The trickiest conflicts, he explained, show up when one person serves two organizations that deal with each other. He pointed straight at board members living through a district split. In those cases, he said, the official is “a fiduciary for both.”
King fits that description exactly. So does at least one other board member.
Voters created Aspen Peaks, Lake Mountain and Timpanogos school districts in November 2024, with the exception of Pleasant Grove, Lindon, Vineyard, and Orem, which got assimilated into the Timpanogos district. All three new boards took their oaths last November. But ASD keeps legal control of its assets, debts and staff until it dissolves July 1, 2027, which means a handful of officials now answer to more than one of these entities at the same time.
King was elected Alpine board president on Jan. 7, 2025, and then elected to the same role at Lake Mountain on Nov. 25, 2025, according to her written responses. She argues state law already limits the damage a conflicted vote could do. ASD can’t borrow for new projects without the new districts signing off, she said, and any debt a new district takes on stays that district’s problem. King has not stepped aside from a single ASD vote on dividing assets, and she says she hasn’t needed to.
“I have not recused myself because I have not participated on both sides of the same decision-making body,” King said.
When the resource-allocation agreement between the three districts arose, King voted only as a Lake Mountain member, she said. That deal passed unanimously across all three districts.
King also pushes back on the idea that ASD is “handing anything over.” The assets, she said, were never ASD’s to give. “They belong to the taxpayers who funded them,” King said, framing the split as a division of public property rather than a negotiation between winners and losers.
Not everyone buys that argument. Sarah Beeson, who sits on the ASD Board alongside King, says she’s uneasy watching one person lead both sides simultaneously.
“I am concerned that our current board president is serving as president of both the Alpine School District Board and a new district board at the same time,” Beeson said. “While I respect the individual and their service, I believe leadership roles come with a duty of undivided loyalty to the organization being governed. When one person is simultaneously leading two boards, it is reasonable to ask whether competing interests could arise while assets are being divided, budgets are being discussed, and other strategic planning decisions are being made.”
Beeson didn’t soften the point on the way out. “During a transition as significant as the division of Alpine School District, maintaining public trust should be one of our highest priorities,” Beeson said.
King isn’t alone in wearing two hats. Ada Wilson holds Alpine’s Seat 7 while also representing Seat 4 on the incoming Timpanogos board. Wilson says nobody’s hiding anything.
“My service in both the Alpine and Timpanogos districts is well known by the public because I am an elected official,” Wilson said. Part of her campaign platform was serving as a bridge between the old district and the new one. She hasn’t recused herself from ASD votes, and asked to stay off the committee negotiating the asset split in the first place. Still, Wilson didn’t wave off the underlying worry. She called the concern legitimate. “There are lots of eyes watching, which is good,” she said.
Joylin Lincoln stands on nearly the same ground. She sits on the ASD board, now holds Seat 7 at Lake Mountain, and points to the statute itself when the fairness question comes up.
Lawmakers wrote Utah Code 53G-3-302 to allow board members to serve on both the old and new boards during the transition, Lincoln said, so ASD wouldn’t lose experienced members while the new districts find their footing. Her two roles don’t compete, she argues. ASD runs the district and guards its assets through 2027. Lake Mountain builds something ready to open on day one. And because state law hands the job of dividing ASD’s assets between the new districts, not to ASD’s board, Lincoln says she’s never faced a vote that called for recusal. The minutes for both boards, she noted, sit in public view on the state’s public notice website.
The overlap continues with other ASD employees, too. Rob Smith, Alpine’s interim superintendent, took questions about district employees now cashing ASD paychecks while stepping into leadership jobs at the new districts. Aspen Peaks Superintendent Joel Perkins and Lake Mountain Superintendent Vicki Carter both started their new posts Feb. 19, 2026, Smith said, but ASD kept paying their salaries through June 30, 2026, under an agreement between the districts. Timpanogos got an allowance to help cover Superintendent Joe Jensen, who’d already retired from ASD.
ASD business administrator Jason Sundberg moved to employment with the Timpangos on Feb. 26, and Bea Twede moved to Aspen Peaks on March 23. Alpine covered both salaries through the same June 30 date and kicked in an extra allowance to Lake Mountain, which hadn’t yet hired its own business administrator.
Here’s the part that matters most. Smith said the people changing jobs aren’t the ones carving up ASD funds. That work fell to Craig Carter, ASD’s business administrator, who came from Davis School District and isn’t headed to any new local district. Carter built the asset-and-liability framework under state law.
A third-party reviewer, Burke Jolley of the Utah Association of School Business Officials, checked his math before all three new boards signed off unanimously. ASD’s policies 3070 and 4104 outline the conflict-of-interest rules for employees, Smith said, and ASD’s own purchasing team still handles procurement for the new districts that haven’t yet created their own purchasing teams.
That leaves one more board member: Nicki Brammer. The Aspen Peaks board member is married to state Sen. Brady Brammer, who sponsored HB 3003, a 2024 special-session bill that adjusted the ground rules for the school district split election. The change was made due to a conflict with cities and school districts both seeking competing paths to be put on the same ballot.
She says her husband sits on no education committee and usually sends education-bill questions to lawmakers who do. Brammer says she’s disclosed the marriage publicly, including on a formal conflict-of-interest form posted on her board profile, and hasn’t reached a decision that would force her to step aside, though she says she’d do so if one came up.
Brammer also served on the county committee that recommended Aspen Peaks’ boundaries, then ran for and won a seat inside those same lines. The committee only recommended, she said. The Utah County Commission made the final call. She points to fellow committee member Stacy Bateman, who helped draw the boundaries and then lost her own race in the new district, as proof the process didn’t hand anyone a guaranteed win. Brammer’s seat, for what it’s worth, ended up covering Highland and part of Lehi rather than Alpine City, where her kids had most recently gone to school. “Anyone looking at the actual breakdown of the voting district I ended up running in,” she said, “would probably agree that I didn’t benefit at all.”
