Thanksgiving Morning, Pastoral and Beautiful Morgan Valley
by jotor
Northern Metro Development - Tribune Feature
Morgan: Growing up without growing out
By Brandon Loomis
The Salt Lake Tribune
Morgan » No offense, Riverdale, but Morgan County wants to get off the road that leads to your big-box brand of suburbia.
Same for your glitz and glam, Park City. Morgan is an up-and-coming mountain hub that soon will be the fastest-growing county in Utah, but its residents don't want their kids pushed out by million-dollar mortgages.
Heber City's mix of mountain destinations, hay flats and Main Street milkshakes is more like it, according to Envision Utah planners who worked with Morgan residents to dream up their future.
"If nothing is done, we would wake up probably 30 years from now and, in a lot of areas, we'd look just like the Wasatch Front: You can't tell where one city ends and another begins," said Morgan County Council Chairman Bruce Sanders, who worked with hundreds of residents to craft the "Envision Morgan" ideal. The future they mapped preserves farms and concentrates housing in towns and villages such as Morgan City and Mountain Green.
Change is coming faster to this sheep-shearing valley than any other corner of Utah. For the next half-century, demographers say, Wasatch Front commuters will spill over these mountains in a statistical wave that pulses as fast or faster than the St. George area in the state's desert southwest.
With nearly 10,000 residents today, Morgan County swelled by about 4 percent last year, according to the Governor's Office of Planning and Budget. The state projects that growth to hover at 3.8 percent a year through 2060, leading (with Washington County) the list of 29 counties until it nears 70,000 souls. That would make it twice as big as today's Iron County, home to Cedar City.
Stone mason Brent Hadley caught the Morgan tide early and moved there nine years ago from Ogden, a half-hour down Interstate 84. He is the kind of Utahn that experts predict will drive the county's urbanization: a Wasatch Front refugee seeking greener pastures, a small-town home and speedier access to the forests and the ski slopes.
"That's why I'm in this business," he said while measuring a new home's front entry for masonry, "so I can ski all winter."
He gets to take the back way to Snowbasin, dodging the weekend traffic from Ogden. His wife, he said, gets to enjoy the mountain air with their young children.
"When we lived in Ogden, she didn't really feel comfortable taking a walk after work," Hadley said. "Now she does it every day -- puts the kids in the stroller."
Morgan is shaping up as Ogden's Park City, University of Utah demographer and economist Pam Perlich said. People come up from the city and want to live in the clean air.
"There's a lot
of good stuff happening in Ogden in terms of job growth," she said. "A lot of that [working] population would be interested in living in Morgan County - it's a beautiful place."
Perlich's study of commuting patterns from the 2000 census points to a burgeoning bedroom community. Morgan County saw by far the highest percentage of its workers leaving the county for work every day, at 61.6 percent, according to a report Perlich compiled in 2003 for the Utah Economic and Business Review. Davis County followed at 45.7 percent.
County residents who worked with Envision Morgan to craft a new growth blueprint favored farmland protection with busier town centers. They most often likened the alternative -- unchecked sprawl across the fields -- to the Ogden suburb of Riverdale, Envision Morgan project manager Christie Oostema said. That's the first suburb they see when they descend Weber Canyon, and its welcome mat off I-84 is a SuperTarget store backed by the ubiquitous Chili's, PetsMart, Starbucks and Applebee's. Morgan City, by contrast, has two closed cafes on its old main drag but a little Mexican cafe and a drive-in near the new homes. It has a local butcher and a Jubilee grocer instead of Utah's usual Albertsons or Smith's.
Others feared morphing into their southern neighbors in Summit County, home to the Sundance Film Festival and Utah's ritziest real estate.
One tool they embraced has little precedent in Utah, and none on a large scale. It's commonly called TDR, or transfer of development rights, and it allows homebuilders to buy up the development rights on farms while putting the resulting homes in designated areas in towns. It's a bold move for a county where manure trails still smudge the two-lane highways, but Oostema said residents dread the alternative.
"Morgan County has had a fairly long history of growing rather slowly and now, in the next couple of decades, they're going to have a tremendous amount of growth," she said. "It's hard to think about."
Sanders, the County Council chairman, said the county will move quickly to embrace Envision Morgan. Next week, the council will endorse the recommendations, he said, and already it has budgeted to update its development plan in the new year. The plan will rely on TDRs that allow farmers to receive payment to protect their land, he said. The county would have to enact a plan enabling extra density in town only when developers have paid for preservation in fields.
Most people want action to preserve their views and the county's farming heritage, Sanders said. Only 4 percent who participated in Envision Morgan surveys backed "business as usual."
"The vast majority realize there's a better way," he said.
Transferring development rights has worked well on the East and West coasts but has a spotty record in the Rockies, according to The Nature Conservancy's Utah director, Dave Livermore. A major disappointment was in Davis County, where cities never adopted the practice in ordinances to match a Great Salt Lake wetlands-protection plan.
He's hopeful about Morgan County, though, because there is strong support for rural protection and the chosen method is voluntary.
"There's no taxation involved," Livermore said. "The market decides and growth fuels the preservation."
Morgan County farmer Doug Brown said it's a good idea, but it won't change newcomers' desires.
"Only problem is no one wants to live in the village centers," he said. "They all want to live out here in the farm fields."
Economics may help change that. County officials may boost density in towns partly to encourage town houses that the locals' children might buy when they're grown instead of being squeezed out by escalating prices on acreages.
The state counts a 34 percent population surge in Morgan County just since 2000 and expects a 600 percent leap by 2060. At that rate, the way the stucco houses now sprout across the farms and foothills, there will be few fields left when today's children become tomorrow's homeowners.
With developments such as The Cottonwoods, Mountain Green and other Morgan County hamlets are fueling growth that is projected to make Morgan County the fastest-growing county in the next half-century. (Chris Detrick / The Salt Lake Tribune)
As Morgan County grows, county officials hope to channel the growth into rural hamlets, rather than allow unrestricted building across the countryside. Morgan County is expected to add population at 3.8 percent a year for the next half century. (Brandon Loomis / The Salt Lake Tribune)
What's Envision Morgan?
The statewide nonprofit planning partnership Envision Utah spun off a Morgan consensus-seeking project this year, and most county residents favored concentrating growth in town centers while protecting farmlands and hillsides. Now it's up to the Morgan County Council to decide whether to turn that guidance into a new zoning ordinance and preservation tools such as allowing developers to pay farmers for development rights while clustering the resulting homes in town.
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