Members of the Cache County Council appeared to be having second thoughts about the proposed Open Space Bond Issue on the November ballot at a public hearing on the issue during their regular meeting on Sept. 27.
CACHE COUNTY – With a bond issue already scheduled on the November ballot, some members of the Cache County Council now appear to be having second thoughts about the Open Space proposal.
At a public hearing on the proposed Open Space Bond during the County Council’s meeting on Sept. 27, council member Paul Borup cautioned voters that the impact of the $20 million bond issue will be practically unnoticeable.
“Utah State University, in 2018, in a report on the size and scope of Cache County’s agriculture,” he said, “estimated that there is about 276,000 acres in farms in Cache County.
“If you just do $25,000 an acre, that’s $6.9 billion dollars. How much is $20 million of $6.9 billion? It’s .002 percent.
“I don’t agree with Paul Rogers on a lot of stuff,” Borup said, referring to a local resident who spoke earlier in the public hearing suggesting that the bond issue really didn’t go far enough. “But at least he’s being honest. This is going to be a gargantuanly expensive endeavor, if you’re even going to know it happened.”
The reality, Borup insisted, is that no one is going to drive out of Sardine Canyon and see beautiful green fields.
“Because that’s not what this (bond issue) is going to do,” he added. “It will preserve some (agricultural land), but you won’t even notice that it got preserved.”
Speaking as a member of the Open Space Advocacy Committee (OSAC), Steve Daniels acknowledged that the proposed bond could never come up with the money to protect all of Cache Valley’s agricultural land.
“That would, in fact, be pretty anti-growth,” Daniels said. “What something like this does is allow you to protect the jewels in the valley. Not everything, but those remarkable jewels that you want to have as legacy lands.
“We’re going to work with a board having explicit criteria and be able to leverage this money against other state and federal funds.”
Council member Gina Worthen repeated her concerns about how the Open Space Advocacy board will function if the ballot proposition is passed.
“This is why I voted ‘no’ to putting it on the ballot,” she said. “Not because I don’t favor open space, but I felt like we had not worked out these details yet.
“It does voters a great disservice not to have those details worked out. We end up voting on emotions rather than substance.”
But Daniels explained that among the resources available on the OSAC’s website at https://cacheopenspace.org are examples of ordinances passed by other counties under similar circumstances.
“They are tremendous models that we can use,” he added. “We didn’t want to get too far ahead of our headlights and say this is the ordinance you should draft, because there will be new members on the council after this election.”
At a council meeting on Aug. 23, council member David Erickson also expressed disappointment with the composition of the advocacy committee.
He described the members of the committee as a bunch of bureaucrats, not the farmers whose land might be placed in trust if the bond issue is approved by voters.
“I think that we (farmers) have the highest stake in (the bond issue),” Erickson explained, “but maybe we don’t have the big money to make it look flowery and elegant.”
Daniels countered that the Utah Farm Bureau was supporting the bond issue along with a number of local land-owners including Joe Furhriman and Mark Thompson.
If the council is showing little enthusiasm for the bond issue, the public seems to be solidly behind it.
Local officials who spoke in favor of the proposal on Sept. 27 included state representatives Casey Snider and Dan Johnson; Logan Mayor Holly Daines; and Logan council member Tom Jensen.
Political hopefuls Marc Ensign, a write-in candidate for county executive, and Patrick Belmont, a challenger for Johnson’s seat in the Utah Legislature, also favored the proposal.
While several local citizens spoke in favor of the bond issue, only Andrew Speth voiced objections, accusing the county of trying to tax retired people out of their homes.
Jack Draxler, the former North Logan mayor and co-chair of the OSAC, added that many questions about the bond issue would be explained by a mailer that the committee plans to send to all Cache County voters prior to the Nov. 8 election.
Draxler also emphasized that the cost of that mailer would be covered by recent donations to the OSAC, not taxpayer dollars.
The Open Space Bond Issue will appear on the county ballot in the November election along with the renewal of the county’s Recreation, Arts, Parks and Zoos (RAPZ) tax.