I want to talk today about state-created Authorities, which seems to be the approach we undertake in Utah for multi-jurisdictional (regional) economic and land use issues. Examples of what I’m referring to are MIDA (Military Installation Development Authority), Point of the Mountain Land Authority, Inland Port Authority, and the proposed Utah Lake Authority. There may be something coming for the Great Salt Lake as well, and for, well, we’ll see.
The first such entity stood up was MIDA in 2007 (full disclosure – I was Director of Davis County Community & Economic Development at the time and closely involved in the process). The justification for the creation of MIDA was the preservation and enhancement of an important economic and jobs base for the state generally and northern Utah in particular – Hill Air Force Base. The story behind all this is a long and complex one which would take a lot of space to tell, so let me summarize it more briefly. Because of federal defense funding cutbacks, a number of military bases around the country were being looked at for closure. Hill Air Force Base, which employed some 14,000 people in northern Utah directly and many more through spin-off economic effects, was in danger because it’s buildings were old and increasingly dysfunctional, and Congress was in no mood to fund new infrastructure. An approach was instituted in another state however, which allowed for federal land on a military base to be leased to private entities for development of associated new buildings and facilities that were then leased to the defense department for military use. HAFB had lots of vacant land adjacent to existing communities in Davis and Weber counties that could serve such a purpose, where the adjacent cities could provide the necessary municipal services for new development like water, sewer, building permitting and inspection, police and fire and so on. But the area was spread among at least four different cities, and finding the funding and sophistication for negotiating three-way contracts, leases and financing was a daunting specter.
So, with the support of local and state officials, the state legislature declared that there was a compelling state-wide public interest in preserving and enhancing this significant economic base and created MIDA. This Authority included the ability to contract, raise tax revenue, and have land use authority. The actual needed municipal services would be provided by the adjacent cities through agreements with MIDA, for which they would receive funds from MIDA. The model established was a governing board that included state officials and local representatives from the involved local governments.
The venture has worked out quite well, with leases and agreements worked out between the federal government (owners of the land), local governments for services, and private developers to build the needed facilities. Falcon Hillhttps://www.woodburycorp.com/portfolio/falconhill/ with Woodbury as the main developer is been taking shape for several years now.
Since I focus on planning and land use issues, I want to focus on that aspect of this approach in dealing with such regional issues. Because of the situation in this instance, where the land was federally owned and thus not subject to local land use regulation at all, and the area in consideration was adjacent to four different cities, in two different counties, it made some sense for this state-created entity to have land use authority. Including officials from the involved local entities on the MIDA governing board also assured that there would be local input on what was ultimately developed and how. It was not a perfect model from the outset – the MIDA provisions were tweaked just about every year by the state legislature. And there may have been other ways to deal with this. Certainly there were rough spots, with federal, state and local officials having to work out concerns and differences. But overall, it has accomplished what was intended at the outset.
The model was then applied to other similar situations. When the National Security Agency was looking around nationally for a site for its new super computing center, it settled on building it in Bluffdale, again on federal land (Camp Williams) with locally provided infrastructure and services, again all coordinated through MIDA https://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=51391693&itype=CMSID. The state legislature authorized this new use of MIDA as a state-wide interest in bringing the economic benefit of such a nationally significant facility to the state.
When the decision was made to close the existing state prison and build a new one at a new location, the question arose of what to do with the approximately 700-acre old prison site. Again, it was viewed by the legislature that this could be a project of significant statewide interest (all of downtown Salt Lake City, for example, is encompassed within an area of around 700 acres, depending on where you draw the boundaries). The legislature, after study and recommendations by a state commission, thus created the Point of the Mountain Land Authority. While the prison property is located within Draper City, it is entirely state-owned and thus not subject to local land use authority. The Point authority retained this land use control, and local officials were again included on the authority governing board. https://thepointutah.org/
The characteristic of using such authorities for development of government-owned land began to change, though, when MIDA was brought in to assist in the relocation of the Hillhaus, a defense department-owned military recreation lodging facility at Snowbasin ski resort which was subsumed into the Olympic facilities for the 2002 winter games. The promise was that the lodge would be relocated elsewhere, and eventually federal and state officials agreed that MIDA would be the best way to accomplish this. A site was located near Park City on federal property, but again through a long and complicated process, things evolved to the point where there is now a major new ski resort underway by a private developer under the auspices of MIDA which helped make the financing more feasible, and again subsumed local land use control. Only this time, the land use control involved not just government-owned property, but substantial privately owned property as well. Long story made short, this caused some issues with the local entity that normally would have that authority (Wasatch County), and it was a complicated and controversial workout (a local official has been allowed to sit on the MIDA governing body of this project, though). https://www.standard.net/hilltop-news/2021/jun/17/mwr-hotel-construction-project-officially-underway/
Arguably the most controversial use of this Authority approach has been the Inland Port Authority, located west of the Salt Lake International Airport, in Salt Lake City. The statewide interest identified by the legislature is the establishment of a significant economic benefit with a rail freight transfer facility and associated development that would occur. Part of the state justification for involvement in this proposal is to take advantage of the significant infrastructure that state has paid to have put in this area for the new state prison, located just to the west of the inland port area. Almost all of the property involved in this one, however, is privately owned, and thus would normally fall under SLC’s land use authority. There has been plenty of controversy over this project, including over the land use authority, taxing and revenue authority, and so on. The controversy here is also enhanced, in my opinion, because this project is located in SLC, which has a level of politics and issues that don’t generally exist elsewhere in the state. This one is still playing out, and there are bills in the legislature this session to make more changes to the Inland Port Authority, including to the composition of its board membership (reducing local government involvement). https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2022/02/22/slc-would-lose-seats/
The Authority trend is continuing with the proposed Utah Lake Authority, a bill which is pending in this year’s legislative session (see previous posts). The statewide purpose for this one is the environmental rehabilitation of Utah Lake, considered a statewide resource. Again, controversy surrounds the discussions about what to do and how to do it, most notably about a proposal by a private entity to dredge the entire lake bed making it deeper, using the dredged material to create new island in the lake, and building new communities on some of the islands. The lake bed itself is sovereign state land, so here we have the issue of the state retaining land use control over state lands, which the Authority would have, and thus be responsible for whether and how any such islands, if they are created, would be developed. The Utah Lake Authority bill was originally proposed in last year’s legislative session, and that one would have given the Authority jurisdiction over some of the lands adjacent to the lakeshore, which caused a lot of concerns and ultimately put the bill on hold until this year’s session. The bill currently gives the Authority jurisdiction over only the lakebed sovereign lands. We’ll see how this all works out, and it’s an important one to watch for this reason. https://www.deseret.com/utah/2022/2/12/22925651/utah-lake-islands-project-pushback-lawmakers-utah-county-towns-lake-restoration-vineyard
How else might this Authority concept be used in the future? Perhaps for preservation of the Great Salt Lake, which might extend throughout the entire GSL watershed? How about for housing affordability? An idea has actually been floated that the state legislature would find a compelling statewide beneficial public interest in enhancing housing affordability, and instead of doing the zoning reform thing that many other states are now doing, instead create a housing affordability authority, that could then find private entities willing to build more “affordable” housing if the conditions (i.e., the local land use regulations) were more conducive, and then legislatively create an area where the authority would have jurisdiction, overriding local controls. There’s both merit and danger in such an approach, one that would surely engender a lot of controversy and debate.
Well. I’ve beat this horse to death, and all for something that may not ever really be a concern. Or…?