The claim
A councilman said the city has no money
“Brett Wright talked about how broke the city is and how there is NO MONEY.”
Seen: Eagle Mountain City Tax Referendum Facebook group, August 2026.
The record is complete enough to check it, and does not bear it out.
Not what the recording has him saying. His argument that night was about choices and about not standing for re-election, not about an empty account.
The numbers
What’s true
Wright did speak at length about the city's finances at the August 6 hearing, and the council as a body did argue that the current revenue mix is not holding. He seconded the motion that set the rate.
Where it goes wrong
What he actually said was that the easy path would have been to do nothing and keep cutting services, and that he is in his fifth year and will not run again. His stated reason for voting without an electoral calculation in it. The council's case was structural rather than “no money”: sales tax is being consumed by the sheriff's contract, leaving intersections without signals; sales tax collapses in a downturn and the need for police does not; and Councilmember Wood put the city's share of the master transportation plan at $419 million by 2035. Residents in the same room argued the opposite, that the city already has the money.
More detail
The transcript of this meeting is now speaker-attributed, so the remarks above can be read against his name rather than inferred. The chair hands off to each member by name before they speak (“Okay, thank you. Councilmember Wright, go ahead”), and Wright's reply runs from there to “My time's about out, but thank you for being here.” Nothing in it says the city has no money.
The later open deliberation is a different matter: after about 03:42 members interrupt each other and the chair stops introducing anyone, so that stretch is left unattributed on the site rather than guessed. The second quotation below sits in that stretch, which is why it is credited to a councilmember and not to a named one.
Where this comes from
Every finding here is drawn from an open-meeting recording or a published document. Check it yourself.
“I've started into my second term. This is my fifth year. I'm not going to rerun.”
“We have intersections that are missing traffic control signals because we can't afford to put them in. Where does that money come from? If we continue to pull sales tax dollars, which could fund those infrastructure improvements, and we continue to allocate it to our sheriff's contract…”
Read more on this site
More checks on budget & spending
- Accurate, but incompleteA developer was let out of building the rodeo grounds
- Not settledThe mayor is shopping for new rodeo grounds
- Not settledA free repair of the eagle monument was ignored
- MisleadingThe tax is really about the rodeo grounds
Checked August 21, 2026. Nothing goes on the fact-check list unless an open-meeting recording or a published document can settle it: the rules. Spot a mistake? civicrollcall@gmail.com