Summit County has the next four years to figure out how to pay for the 8,600-acre 910 Cattle Ranch it acquired last month. The good news, according to Wendy Fisher, the executive director of Utah Open Lands, is that there is more federal money to help pay for this $55-million purchase than there has ever been, thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act.
“Don't ask me to explain it - all I know is that it's resulted in a lot of federal programs, like forest legacy and NRCS, receiving a significant amount of money,” Fisher explained. “And this probably won't happen again. So, I think when you hear that they're very optimistic with the grants that are out there, yeah, I think there's reason to be optimistic.”
While the county has time to figure out the funding, she says it shouldn’t waste any time putting together staff to start a baseline of the property and eventually implement the approved conservation plan.
“I think that fundamentally you need to have people that understand the dynamic ecological values that are on a property like that, to make sure that you are monitoring that in the future,” Fisher said. “You're doing vegetative transects, you're looking at the aspen for forest health, which is a great barometer for a lot of different things. So yeah, I think that that does become one of the issues.”
Utah Open Lands was hired by Park City in 2017 to put together the baseline and conservation management plan for the 1,500-acre Bonanza Flat property – a very different property than what the county has with the 910 Ranch.
“The baseline on Bonanza had miles and miles of manmade disturbances,” she said. “A lot of trespass had taken place on that property and there wasn't a lot of sustainable thought, moving into the trail system. We've got empirical data now that the work that we've done since the management plan was adopted for Bonanza in 2020, actually has improved the trajectory of the health of that property. There are some trails that we have signed and closed; you wouldn't even know that there was a trail there.”
Putting together and approving a management plan, she says, can take years.
“There's a lot of time that needs to be spent in looking at what is on the property and how the property interacts, so to speak, through the seasons,” Fisher said. “Understanding where are the wildlife hanging out? Where are the calving areas and the fawning areas, and what is most critical for those species in terms of the habitat that they rely on. And that is something that takes just time. And if you don't establish that, on the front end, you're not going to really know if you're making progress.”
Meanwhile, Fisher says she just finished with the protection of what’s called the Forty-Fifth Star Preserve – it’s 3,100 acres of property that abuts Bonanza Flat owned by Gary Barnett, the developer of the Mayflower Resort.
She has also submitted applications for state funding for lands within the North Fields in Wasatch County.
While all of the tickets have sold out for their annual fundraiser on Sept. 7, she says there are ways to financially support Utah Open Lands by participating in its online auction. The auction link can be found here.
