I went to the Summit County’s open house about the future of the Ure Ranch property in Kamas.
The county has an option to purchase 834 acres from the extended Ure family. Voters approved an open space bond that was tacitly, if not explicitly, for the purpose of preserving the Kamas meadow. It’s land that is critical to the Weber River watershed, not to mention the character of Kamas Valley.
The bond passed with surprisingly strong support from the east side of the county, which is pretty conservative and very reluctant to consider a tax increase. For preservation, it got widespread support.
It’s been something of a mystery what the management plan will be. The purchase price would have consumed the entire bond. Then the county bought the 910 Ranch in East Canyon, with equally unclear intentions. Between the two, they have committed to spending almost twice what the bond raised.
At this point, both are just (expensive) options to purchase. It’s unclear that any of the bond proceeds have actually been spent yet, or if the options were paid for with other funds that don’t carry the open space restrictions in the bond.
Either way, they are in a bit of a pickle, with a big hole to fill.
The meeting was unusually well-attended. There were over 100 people there when I came in, and the room was turning over with new people arriving as others left. It was as varied a group as the Kamas Valley itself has become.
There were descendants of the pioneers who chased the last Indians out 150 years ago, people so new they still had California plates on their Rivians, Park City refugees, and everybody in between.
If you can raise a crowd like that in a community the size of Kamas, people are paying attention.
There was no presentation, just easels with maps of the “north meadow” and the “opportunity zone.” The “opportunity zone” was a gut punch. The land proposed for conservation isn’t 834 acres. It’s a pretty paltry 185 acres, all on the north side of S.R. 248.
There is another 120 or so acres of similarly irreplaceable meadow land on the south side of S.R. 248 that for some reason was designated part of the “opportunity zone.” About 525 acres extend up the West Hills, out of the meadow, mostly out of sight, and perhaps less important to protect. The term “bait-and-switch” was thrown around.
I don’t know who named it the “opportunity zone,” but it sounds absolutely Orwellian. Wasn’t the goal to thwart development opportunity?
It’s especially scary when you overlay that with the West Hills City proposal. If you haven’t followed that one, it’s another Hideout-style sham incorporation where a developer gets to write his own zoning by incorporating a new city.
I’d love to think that Summit County will do what they can to block that, but given the financial hole they’ve dug with the two big open space purchases, they might play along. All acres are preserved, but some are more preserved than others, or something like that.
The meadow land south of S.R. 248 needs to be immediately reclassified as conservation land and left alone. There’s no room for discussion on that.
I admit that the West Hills portion of the Ure Ranch isn’t critical to the watershed, and while it holds a few cattle for a while, it’s not great grazing land. It adjoins a 400+ acre tract owned by Hidden Meadow Ranch that has been preserved in the Town of Francis. There are existing trails there that could logically be extended into the West Hills portion of the Ure Ranch.
Though it is a departure from the expectations people had during the bond election, there probably are 100 or so acres of the West Hills upland that could be sold for low impact development — maybe 20 lots of 5 acres each. Or used as a regional park.There’s no water or sewer service nearby, so higher density doesn’t work.
At my most optimistic, I had imagined the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream model, where a large scale creamery would take over the Ure dairy, and require enough milk that others in the area would return to the dairy business and make enough on their efforts to willingly keep their land in agriculture.
It brought northeastern Vermont back to life. But land values in booming Kamas aren’t comparable to the forgotten corner of Vermont. There’s no way I’m getting back into the business of milking cows 365 days a year. Been there, done that. If the Ures, with 130 years’ experience running a dairy on that very land couldn’t make it pay, nobody can.
Discussions of development of any scale are inconsistent with what people expected when they voted for open space. Ures own a lot of water rights that need to stay on the pasture land to keep it pasture land. The county needs to find a rancher to lease it, and leave it alone.
Folding any part of it into the West Hills City scheme must not happen, and selling water rights to enable the very development that Kamas Valley voters raised their taxes to prevent — well, “hell no.”
The open house revealed a crisis in confidence, and the County Council needs to make their intentions clear. I don’t know anybody who thinks ounty government should be in the real estate development business.
Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986.