Officials seek input from public in prison site development planning

Have ideas about what the Point of the Mountain area should look like in a few years? The organizations involved in planning for its future want to hear them.

Have ideas about what the Point of the Mountain area should look like in a few years? The organizations involved in planning for its future want to hear them.

The Point of the Mountain Development Commission, created by the Utah Legislature, and Envision Utah are seeking public input as they create a long-range plan for the area, including the 700-acre site of the Utah State Prison that will be vacated when the prison moves to Salt Lake City.

People with ideas can present them at pointofthemountainfuture.org through the end of the year. The website asks for people to “share your big ideas about the Point of the Mountain region and guide the visioning process.” The website is part of a public engagement strategy that will also feature outreach through media, social media, stakeholder partnerships and public meetings.

“There’s sort of a traditional planning approach, which tends to have bad problems at the end,” Ari Bruening, Envision Utah’s chief operating officer, told the commission at its most recent meeting. “Somebody — usually the government — decides through analysis and research what ought to be done, they educate the public about the solution they’ve chosen for them, they announce the plan, they then end up defending the plan because they didn’t involve people from the beginning, and it usually has a bad result.

“That is exactly what we’re trying to avoid here … [instead] to get everybody involved upfront.”

Public and stakeholder engagement is part of Phase 1 of the process, which also will involve research, conceptual visions and goals. Phase 1 is expected to last until next spring. Phase 2, from spring until early winter in 2017, will feature scenario development and modeling and public and stakeholder input on the scenarios. Phase 3, during the winter of 2017-18, will include a funding strategy, vision development, implementation and a final report.

“The No. 1 thing we want in Phase 1 is stakeholder involvement and ideas so that their ideas are taken into account from the very beginning, and the second thing is the public involvement,” Robert Grow, Envision Utah president and chief executive officer, told the commission.

Salt Lake County Mayor Ben McAdams was among commission members urging input from stakeholders and the public. “Thinking about this and having been involved in several of these processes, you know that people don’t care until the process is over and they don’t like the outcome, and then they wonder why you didn’t invite them to meetings that they were invited to for three years,” McAdams said.

As for the next steps, Grow suggested a large public stakeholder meeting by mid-December, with perhaps a series of follow-up meetings and a large public meeting early next spring.

The Point of the Mountain Commission was created during the 2016 legislative session and consists of local officials, private-sector representatives and state officials from both the legislative and executive branches. The Legislature voted last summer for a new $550 million prison to be built at a site near Salt Lake City International Airport that had been unanimously recommended by the Prison Relocation Commission. The Draper facility opened in 1951 and is expensive to maintain. It has about 1,000 workers overseeing about 4,000 inmates and has about 1,500 people who do volunteer work there.

The 700-acre prison site in Draper is seen by some people as a potentially valuable hub for innovative technology companies, augmenting an already tech-heavy area called “Silicon Slopes.”

Envision Utah was selected as a development partner following a bidding process. Members of the Envision Utah team are Fehr & Peers, Fregonese Associates, HOK Design, Horrocks Engineers, RCLCO Real Estate Advisors, Sherwood Design, SWCA Environmental Consultants and Zions Public Finance.

Grow told the commission that there are many issues to consider when planning for the Point of the Mountain area. They include a multitude of government entities and landowners, transportation infrastructure, other infrastructure, finance, economic development, the environment and recreation organizations, school districts and universities, healthcare facilities, churches and others.

“That list is sort of a topics list of all of the people who care and all of the issues that we know about at this point,” Grow said. “There will be much more that will come up as the public is engaged [and] other stakeholders are engaged.”

Grow said the Point of the Mountain area has “a number of major challenges” and opportunities.

“One of the great opportunities is there is a lot of activity here because our growth is focused into this narrow corridor, but if you look at that couple-of-mile-wide strip, there are geographic constraints — the Jordan River, the terrain, environmentally sensitive areas, hazard-prone areas, federal lands and so on,” he said. “You can see clearly the challenge of transportation as 1.5 million people will be in Salt Lake County by 2050 and we’ll have maybe 1.2 to 1.3 million in Utah County, and this becomes the narrow neck of land, essentially, between these two areas.”