At the Wasatch County Council meeting Wednesday, April 2, Heidi Franco, the chair of the Wasatch Open Lands Board, shared a report that details how the county has spent the open space funds voters approved in 2018.
She said conservation easements were finalized or planned for land worth more than six times the $10 million bond.
“We’ve had nine projects, approximately 638.28 acres,” she said. “Of course, this depends on the Gertsch property and what might happen there with UDOT and the bypass road – still, it’s a total easement value of $66.1 million. Absolutely amazing and phenomenal.”
Among the projects funded are the 102-acre Kohler dairy farm, the 46-acre Mountain Spa land, and seven other properties.
In Heber, nine acres are slated to become the Muirfield Nature Park, with views of the North Fields. A design for the park is complete, and the city plans to put the project out to bid by the end of the year.
Franco, who’s also the mayor of Heber City, said several more easements have some hoops to jump through before they’re finalized.
The county council approved funding for the 56-acre Giles farmland in the North Fields two years ago, and last spring, it voted to help fund a conservation easement for 44 acres owned by Christian Michel along River Road. Both easements are expected to be in place within the next couple of months, according to Franco.
More recently, the county council granted funding for 90 acres more in January, a llama farm in Midway and a dairy farm east of Heber.
Other projects are more complicated.
The council promised Laren Gertsch $2.25 million in March 2024 to place more than 165 acres in the North Fields under an easement. But finalizing that agreement is on hold until the Utah Department of Transportation decides where it will build a bypass.
And even if the route doesn’t affect Gertsch’s land, Franco said he will need to start his applications for federal conservation funding from scratch.
“He has to get back in line, and we don’t know if those NRCS grants are going to be there anymore, given what’s going on under the new administration,” she said. “We hope that he can get NRCS funding.”
NRCS is the Natural Resources Conservation Service, a federal program that gives grants to farmers and other landowners to preserve their land. Like many government programs, funding could be at risk of cuts by the new Department of Government Efficiency.
It can be a long process to get federal conservation funding. Franco said it took Gertsch three years from the time he applied to the time he received NRCS funding.
Another large pending easement, the 119-acre Lundin farm, is also up in the air as family members continue to disagree over what the future of the land should be.
Although Franco encouraged the county council to consider putting a new open space bond on the ballot, now that all the 2018 bond money has been appropriated, some councilmembers said they want the current projects finalized first.
“If we were to just say, ‘Go out for a bond this year,’ with the public seeing that we haven’t even spent some of that other money, that would be difficult,” Councilmember Luke Searle said. “And then, I think if we did have some projects that say, this is what [a new bond] would fund, if we did have other people that were interested in it, if we went out for a bond at that time or asked the citizens to vote for that, then I think it would be easier for that to pass.”
Franco urged the council to continue to create incentives for landowners to dedicate their properties as open space.
“You do have other funding sources to continue the momentum that the Open Lands Board feels is definitely here,” she said. “Farmers are seeing now that this is a real option where they can preserve their property, they can preserve their legacy and the county’s legacy through selling their development rights in conservation easements.”
She said apart from a second open space bond, the county can also take a closer look at its rollback taxes. That’s a program by which the county collects extra taxes when farmland is developed, and then 20% of that tax revenue must be invested back into open space.
