By Kim Wheatley
There are several good reasons for voting to incorporate, but for me, this Valley as a place deserves respect. It is worth working to preserve what we hold dear about it, and this is what incorporation is about.
Ogden Valley residents are voting whether or not to leave the nest of Wasatch Front Government and accept the mantle of self-governance. This is a very big deal in the long political history of our Valley in that we have been in this nest since Weber County was created in 1849. This vote will determine who will be the stewards of the Valley and its people for future generations. After the election, stewardship will either remain in the hands of three rotating county commissioners elected by Wasatch Front voters, or it will be taken on by a Valley Council elected by Valley residents.
What we mean by stewardship of the Valley is precisely expressed in the vision of our 2018 General Plan: “The Ogden Valley community desires physical development to complement, not overwhelm or compete with, the rural character of the Valley.”
For this to happen, we need people in charge who agree with this vision and who will work for it, not professional politicians who disagree and see it mostly as an impediment to development. Let’s think long term about this concept of stewardship because this vote is a fork in the road that will determine the future of the Valley.
A Long Way Back
When Lake Bonneville filled up about 15,000 years ago, the Valley was a bay connected to Bonneville by the canyon; Huntsville would have been 92 feet underwater. Then an alluvial dam near the Utah/Idaho border failed and the “Bonneville flood” drained the top 300 feet of the Lake. The flood left the bay high and dry and the Valley as we know it became habitable.
Over thousands of years the Valley evolved into a place surrounded by forest and full of rivers, streams, and animals, especially beaver. We can only imagine the wonderland of ponds, bogs, meadows, and streams the beavers created over thousands of years and ending not so long ago.
About a thousand years after the flood, people were showing up in Utah and at least from the time of Christ, modern indigenous peoples inhabited the Valley from time to time. The last of the nomadic people who came to the Valley to spend summers were the Northern Shoshone, who called it “Ango we ya d’ye” (where the red berries grow). Then, as elsewhere in the world, our agrarian society replaced the nomadic ways of the people who preceded us. Transformation of the Valley was beginning.
But for this to happen, governments had to claim boundaries and the Valley was in the middle of the contest. The first time politics hit the Valley was also the first human-caused transformation of the landscape. Two-hundred years ago the governor of the Hudson Fur Company ordered his trappers to create a “fur desert” by trapping out 100% of the beaver between the Snake and Weber rivers. They made it unattractive for the American fur traders on the Weber to go any further north into Oregon territory. The take of beaver from the Valley was in the thousands and the morphology of the Valley changed as the ponds and meadows gave way to erosion. Since then, this Valley and its peoples have regularly been used as a poker chip in someone else’s game. Here are some highlights.
For the next few decades following the beaver massacre, the Brits had an outpost in Cache Valley, the Americans one on the Weber, and Ogden Valley was a no-man’s land in the middle. The Valley was just a place on the trail between the Bear and Weber rivers and no physical development occurred; however, development was about to explode on the Wasatch Front that would affect the Valley as never before.
The Year 1847 Brought the Pioneers
In 1845, Ogden became the first settlement in Utah territory and by 1856 the Valley was used as a public “commons” where just about anyone could graze their livestock during summer months. By 1860, Liberty, Eden, and Huntsville were settled when brave people decided to spend winters here. By 1861 Huntsville had tapped the South Fork River and in 1862, water shares were being sold in the Wolf Creek area. These were the days when the LDS church was calling the shots and, by all accounts, the people of the Valley and church authorities deserve good grades as stewards even as they were transforming the Valley from “wilderness” to “agrarian.” The Valley had become a special place in the minds of the people who lived here. Families, farms, and communities flourished among the many streams and meadows and the Wasatch Front probably seemed far away. Then events all around began to have a significant and long-term impact; agrarian interests began to lose out to commercial interests.
The Coming of Commercial Interests in 1869
In 1869, the transcontinental railroad came through Weber Canyon and four years later my great-grandmother was born in Huntsville, a child of the timber crews recruited from Europe to deliver our old-growth trees to the wood-hungry railroads and Wasatch Front. The fifteen years of incredible development on the Wasatch Front between 1860 and 1875 created another transformation of the Valley as all old-growth timber became railroad ties, bridge trusses, and Wasatch Front buildings. Even then, it was becoming apparent that stewardship of the Valley was important to the people who lived here and much less so for resource-hungry people who lived on the Front.
More and more, the Wasatch Front was treating the Valley like a colony with resources to be exploited. By 1889 Ogden had drilled for Valley water and an electric streetcar through the Canyon was delivering day tourists to the “artesian well park” near where the dam now stands. Utah wasn’t even a state until 1896, but extracting the Valley’s resources had begun and by 1935, forty-eight wells were sending sixteen million gallons a day down the canyon and streetcars were delivering tourists from Union Station up the canyon every twenty minutes. Thus continued the trend of resource extraction (first beaver, then wood, then water) and now recreational tourism was added to the mix.
Aside from the slow-motion challenges decreasing aquifers, erosion, and increasing tourists were creating, the next big transformation of the Valley occurred in 1937 when Pineview was constructed and then doubled in size with a higher dam in 1940. The feds took the land and homes from Valley residents and flooded 2,800 acres of the heart of the Valley so that Ogden and west Weber County could benefit. The Valley was once again sacrificed for the good of those on the Wasatch Front.
For the next fifty years (1940-1990), the Valley was a slowly growing rural community (an average of 35 new homes a year) and was pretty much ignored by the county in terms of land use decisions (that is, zoning and planning). Later, the county was divided into regional areas with their own planning commissions that could make binding land use and development decisions. Valley residents were quite good at this, and our Valley planning commission supported development that complemented rather than overwhelmed the Valley’s rural character.
During this period, another federal action again changed the character of the Valley. This time for our benefit when Causey Reservoir and the federal bench canals were constructed in 1966. Flooding on the South Fork was mostly controlled, and irrigation water made Valley farms green and productive.
The 1996 General Plan
In the 1980’s, several events happened that would again transform the Valley. A billionaire bought Snowbasin and thousands of acres in 1984, Trapper’s Loop opened in 1989 providing easy access to the Valley for the ballooning population on the Wasatch Front, and the Olympics were headed our way. In the 1990’s, we were adding 124 homes a year. Our planning commissions were well aware of the development pressures and created a philosophy of stewardship when they wrote the first General Plan in 1996. Then they went to work to carry it out.
In 1998, the General Plan was amended to include a chapter titled “Carrying Capacity Analysis” that concluded the maximum number of homes the Valley could handle was 6,500; the Valley was already at 3,300. This, combined with the first wastewater study, led to the controversial downzoning of the Valley from one-acre minimum lot sizes to a three-acre minimum. At the time, our planning folk believed the three-acre minimum would keep us under the 6,200-home carrying capacity due to the three major resource constraints: water, roads, and wastewater. Planners believed we had enough water for 6,200. And while we may not like it, the roads could probably carry double the traffic, and septic tanks and wells could now be placed far enough apart to work safely. As such, the Valley could probably handle twice the pollution without too much impact on quality of life. Also at this time, concerned Valley people created the Ogden Valley Land Trust, instigated by James Hasenyager, to begin conserving parts of the Valley from further development. And The Ogden Valley News was started as a way to keep the Valley community informed about what was happening. A General Plan, three-acre minimums, a Land Trust, and a newspaper were the first major proactive moves Valley organizations made as stewards of the Valley. The vision of them all was to preserve and protect the Valley we hold dear, the best we can.
The County Commission went along with the downzoning of the Valley, but they were not happy about it. It probably triggered the next big political blow to Valley residents because the commissioners had dollar signs in their eyes as the potential for huge development was becoming obvious. Afterall, said they, Trappers Loop solved the transportation problem, four sewer systems solved the wastewater problem, and water wasn’t really considered as a problem at all.
Early 2000’s – County Commissioners Take Over
Within a few years after the downzoning and without warning, Weber County commissioners unilaterally dissolved the separate, regional planning commissions. In their place they created a single valley-wide township planning commission with members appointed by the commissioners. They also assumed absolute power to make decisions. Previously, Weber County commissioners could not override unanimous decisions made by a planning commission. Now, Valley residents were stripped of any authority whatsoever as the planning commission became a recommending body only. The county commissioners declared that they were to be the stewards of the Valley, and input from Valley residents was relegated to the back benches.
For the next several years, county commissioners continued to adopt most of the recommendations made by our planning commission, but then began approving almost any development scheme and were handing out “development rights” for more housing units like candy. Over the objections of the planning commission, Snowbasin and Powder Mountain were given thousands each (Powder Mountain was sold to developers in 2006).
Things began to sour between Valley interests and county interests around 2008 when the General Plan was updated with the “Recreational Element.” In the process of developing the Plan update, we learned that zoning maps permitted far more than 6,200 homes (carrying capacity) at buildout. Now it was more like 15,000. Some thought we had been misled, some thought we’d been lied to, and some thought it was an honest mistake; you choose.
This was the period just before the great real estate recession of 2008 that caused developer bankruptcies throughout the Valley. Growth practically stopped for a few years and the county commissioners were desperate to rebuild the county economy; their eyes were on the Valley.
It was also during the 2008 update to the general plan that we were asking both Valley and Weber County residents what they would like the Valley to become… how it should develop? Ask a Valley resident what they wanted, and you heard “not Park City.” Ask a Wasatch Front resident what they want and you got “kind of like Park City.” This sentiment continues today and county commissioners are hearing “like Park City” from the 97% of county voters who elect them to govern us.
By the time county planners did a definitive study in 2014 of just how many housing units the county had granted, the number had climbed to over 24,000, four times the 5,500 we have today. The 2008 Plan concluded that the Valley could not absorb 16,000 units, let alone 24,000. This is why you see “don’t kill the goose that lays the golden eggs” and “retire existing density” in the 2008 Plan recommendations. “No new density” continues to be the primary theme running through the 2018 General Plan.
The 2018 County Commission Ambush
After two years of study and hundreds of thousands of dollars spent, the 2018 Plan was presented to the Weber County Commission with unanimous support of the Planning Commission and extraordinary support and input from Valley residents. In what can only be described as an ambush, in the last five minutes of the meeting, then Utah representative Gage Froerer came to the microphone and suggested a major change to the well-thought-out and long-hashed-over plan. Two commissioners, over the objections of the third, then amended the plan to say, “no new density except….” And commissioners ever since have used the “except” bit as permission to create additional density (both TDR and “form-based planning” are two examples).
These days, county commissioners regularly ignore planning commission recommendations and make decisions every time that favor rapid development of the Valley and, as in the case of Nordic Valley and Eden Crossing, choose to add more density as developers request it. Worse, they have crafted a set of land use ordinances that make it practically impossible to say no to anything, even if they wanted to.
Since about the year 2000, the county commissioners the Wasatch Front elects have defined “proper stewardship” of the Valley as extracting the maximum economic benefit (tax revenue) the land can produce regardless of what Valley residents think or want. They like phrases like “highest and best use,” “maximize tax revenue,” “fastest growth in the state,” and “incremental tax bond financing.” Perhaps the best recent example of this is Eden Crossing, where the commissioners wrote up an agreement with the developer that includes a contract guaranteeing no property tax increases for the next twenty years on the existing ag land tax rate the development will sit on… just to speed things along.
Let’s face it. The last couple of decades has proven that county commissioners are terrible stewards of the Valley, at least in the way we Valley people define stewardship. Decision after decision is based on the overwhelming, rather than on the complementing of, the rural-character side of the ledger.
Reclaiming Stewardship in 2024
You can easily see where this is going in the short term. Interest rates are declining, the Olympics are coming, and the Valley has been discovered… big time. We are currently adding housing units at an annual rate of nearly 5%, which is likely to increase leading up to the Olympics. But even at the 2022-2023 growth rate of 4.75%, before the Olympics arrive, we will have added another 3,000 units to the 5,000 we now have.
I am heartened that the Valley now has the opportunity to incorporate and resume stewardship. This will put Valley people in charge as we face future growth challenges. Also, we’ll finally have the ability to vote out of office those elected if we don’t like what they are doing. This is fundamentally different from today’s situation; no matter what the commissioners do, we can’t vote them out.
Worse yet, I remember one planning commission meeting where they were looking at a particularly bad proposal and about a hundred Valley folk made the trip to Ogden to voice their concerns. The county attorney told our planning commission that they could not listen to “public clamor” just because people don’t like something; that is, they should not listen to the voice of the people. Voting to incorporate is public clamor that can’t be dismissed.
The years leading up to the Olympics will be difficult for us. We will be running up against the carrying capacity limits described in the General Plan 26 years ago. We are beginning to experience them now and the challenges will be significant. Water is becoming scarce as dueling wells compete for groundwater. The canyon is saturated with traffic several months of the year, and Trapper’s Loop gets busier each year. Every water report warns that we are approaching nitrate and phosphate limits. And the commissioners have handed out way more development rights than they should have.
As you cast your vote in favor of incorporation, you are expressing faith that Valley people will be better at dealing with local challenges and that there’s a better way to do so than what we now have. You are voting to reclaim stewardship of the Valley by and for the people who live here.
To learn more about the proposed incorporation of Ogden Valley and its sponsors, or to view recordings of previous informational incorporation presentations hosted at the library, please visit ogdenvalleyinc.org. You may also access the OV incorporation blog site at ogdenvalleyinc.org/blog/. Ogden Valley incorporation sponsor Mark Ferrin is also available to answer questions. You may reach out to him at 801-745-0445.