Commission sends its Point of the Mountain vision to lawmakers

By Brice Wallace

A 700-acre site at Point of the Mountain is home to the Utah State Prison, but a state-appointed commission wants to see it eventually turn into a bustling area boasting a nationally known research or university center that could prompt more high-paying jobs throughout the Wasatch Front.

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A scenario with that center has been selected by the Point of the Mountain Development Commission for consideration by the Legislature. That preferred scenario blends two of five options the commission considered for the prison site and 20,000 more undeveloped acres between Sandy and Lehi.

One concept for the prison site is a combination of mixed-use, office, retail and residential areas, as well as open space and a major research center, with the center serving as a catalyst for the growth of high-paying jobs and a magnet for both high-level employers and their employees.

Speaking last week to the Rotary Club of Salt Lake City, Robert Grow, president and chief executive officer of Envision Utah, which was selected for the visioning and planning of the region, said that developing the region the way the commission envisions would lead to 150,000 new jobs by 2050. One-third would be at Point of the Mountain, with the remainder spread along the Wasatch Front.

“This is about building the entire innovation cluster for Utah — building a flagship among flagships other places,” Grow said.

What’s more, the jobs would pay an average of $120,000, and the average annual income of every household in a four-county area would grow by $10,000, he said.

If the region fails to undertake the preferred vision, those 150,000 jobs would be lost, and for every IT job lost, the state also loses four support jobs, eight other jobs, $816,000 in annual personal income and $17,400 in annual net state revenue, he said.

“We’ll never know we lost them because they never came,” Grow said of the jobs. “They won’t come and leave; they just won’t come. There’s probably no economic opportunity in the state of Utah, anything that we could do, that could bump economic growth for the future like doing this Point of the Mountain area right in the years ahead.”

Speaking at a recent Governor’s Office of Economic Development (GOED) board meeting, Christopher Conabee, a GOED board member and co-chair of the commission, said the research center could take one of several forms. It could be like an Apple Inc. campus, a collaboration among all existing Utah higher education institutions or perhaps a new institution, among others, he said.

Grow said a group of consultants studied high-tech centers in the U.S. and worldwide and found that Utah is competing with about 14 others in U.S.

“But we are the smallest of the 15. Some might say we may be the weakest of the 15,” he said. “We actually have some amazing things going on here, but it’s not like we have the critical mass of Research Triangle Park in Raleigh/Durham or Silicon Valley or Seattle. So, we are still the David in this Goliath battle, and we need to think of ourselves that way if we are going to get things right, and it’s going to take a lot of focus to do that.”

While preferred development of Point of the Mountain would boost incomes and tax revenues, it also would come at a cost: Transportation infrastructure would have a price tag of up to $11.4 billion. While the first phase of the commission’s work featured public input and the second featured scenario development, the next phase will focus on financing the preferred scenario.

While the Point of the Mountain area has challenges — including being a traffic bottleneck between two heavily populated counties — it also represents a huge development opportunity, Grow and Conabee said.

“If you want to go find 700 acres between two universities; 45 minutes from an international airport; 15 minutes from a major east-west, north-south freeway; at an exit in a major market; with a demographic of 3 million people or 4 million people in 2050, good luck finding it, and we have that,” Conabee said of the prison site. “And so, if we do this correctly, we can solve not just a lot of our problems but we can be a key site for some really large, large innovation and pay rates.”

“It’s a fabulous site,” Grow said. “Any region of America would love to have 600-700 acres sitting in the middle where they could actually develop something like this. … We have a place right in the middle of a booming region between our two strongest, fastest-growing counties where we can create a fabulous place for the jobs of the future.

“What we do in this 20,000 acres — and particularly in the prison site — will set the tempo and design for this ‘center place’ of the Wasatch Front for years to come.”

“The good news is, we have a scenario that works,” Conabee said. “The bad news is, if we don’t implement that scenario quickly, every day that we wait, every month that we wait, more ground gets bought up and more things happen that prohibit us from doing it.”

Details about the preferred scenario are at https://pointofthemountainfuture.org. {/mprestriction}