Mayors of a boomtown

After the founder

Rulon Gammon led Vineyard as its founding mayor after the town incorporated in 1989. By September 2005 the job belonged to Randy Farnworth, and he had inherited a town with a hole in the middle of it. Geneva Steel, the mill that had been the town's tax base since incorporation, was closed and being torn down.

Farnworth's years were spent filling that hole. When ground was broken for the Lake Side power plant in September 2005, he told reporters it would give the town a tax base it had lacked since the mill shut down. In 2010 he was still mayor when Utah Valley University voted to buy 100 acres of the Geneva site, a deal his town's redevelopment agency helped pay for.

Then the houses came. In 2015, census estimates showed Vineyard's population jumping from 617 to 3,195, the fastest growth of any town in the country. Jacob McHargue, who had joined the staff as a deputy treasurer around 2013, was soon hired as the city's first city manager. In the summer of 2016 Vineyard was certified as a city rather than a town.

The third mayor

In November 2017, voters chose Julie Fullmer as mayor. She was 32, co-owned a marketing firm with her husband and was a student at UVU. She had moved to Vineyard in 2011, when it had about 150 residents, then served nearly two years on the planning commission and four on the city council. The Salt Lake Tribune noted she was the first woman elected mayor in the city's 28 years. The Daily Herald would later describe her as the city's third mayor.

In May 2019 the Census Bureau named it the fastest-growing city in America with at least 1,000 residents for the fourth straight year, after a 63 percent jump in a single year. Over the decade it grew from 110 people in the 2010 estimates base to 11,866 in 2019, a gain of 10,687 percent. "That's pretty astonishing," said Pam Perlich, a University of Utah demographer.

Vineyard also changed how it voted. In 2019 it was one of two Utah cities, with Payson, to test ranked choice voting, letting residents rank council candidates instead of choosing one. One council race ran seven rounds of counting. The city recorder, Pamela Spencer, judged the experiment a success, and noted that it let cities skip a primary and hold a single election.

Fullmer won a second term in 2021 under the same system, taking about 87 percent of first choice votes against two challengers. In 2022 she ran for Congress in Utah's 1st District. At home, the friction was building.

Pushback

In January 2024, Jacob Holdaway, a sixth generation resident, joined the council after a landslide win and became her most prominent critic. A Salt Lake Tribune and New York Times report that December described residents who had signed two petitions calling for her resignation, accusing her of secrecy and of deferring to developers. It reported that she had pledged $5 million in public funds to a proposal for artificial islands in Utah Lake without the council's knowledge. Former planning commissioner Tim Blackburn put it simply: "People just don't trust her to fulfill her commitments."

The council answered with a change to the city's form of government. On June 26, 2024, it voted 3 to 2 to put Proposition 10 on the ballot. The measure grew the council from four members plus the mayor to five members, with the mayor still chairing meetings and running administration but voting mainly to break ties and on a few critical matters, such as hiring or firing a city manager. Council member Mardi Sifuentes, who proposed it, said it created better checks and balances. In November 2024, about 74 percent of voters approved it, to take effect in January 2026.

In June 2025 came an audit. State Auditor Tina Cannon reported that Vineyard had failed to post more than $35 million in redevelopment agency transactions to the state's public transparency website over four years, and that the agency's taxing entity committee had not met since 2011. "If you have nothing to hide, hide nothing," Cannon said. The city replied that its reports had been submitted on time and in good faith, that quarterly files had not been replaced with full year files, and that the auditor had found no misuse of funds.

A new mayor

Fullmer had said during her 2021 campaign that her second term would be her last, and she kept her word. The 2025 race pitted Sifuentes, who had served alongside Fullmer for years, against Zack Stratton, an entrepreneur backed by Holdaway. Election night tallies gave Stratton 58 percent to Sifuentes's 41. Voters also filled three council seats, including the new one, from a crowded field.

On November 18, 2025, the council certified Stratton as mayor and David Lauret, Parker McCumber and Jacob Wood as council members. Because of the change in government, one of the three had to serve a two year term, chosen by drawing lots. McCumber drew the short straw. They took office at noon on January 5, 2026.

By late 2024 Vineyard counted about 22,000 people, more than a hundred times the farm town that elected Rulon Gammon. In September 2026, Mayor Stratton stood with the leaders of the Utah House and Senate at a cornerstone ceremony for a cancer research campus on the old Geneva land, the latest chapter in a story his predecessors had helped write.