SALT LAKE CITY: Six possible locations for a new state prison have spurred protests from residents and local officials, including one city council that’s looking to hire a lobbyist and another that fast-tracked a housing development remove a nearby site from consideration.
That leaves five sites in Salt Lake, Tooele and Utah counties for state officials to zero in on, but locals are complaining a nearby prison is undesirable and will hamper development.
“Almost all of the sites that are on the list _ they’re not in the path of economic development. They’re on the edge of economic development,” said Sen. Jerry Stevenson, a Layton Republican and co-chairman of the Prison Relocation Commission. “I believe that there’s a big difference there.”
State officials say the current 700-acre prison in the Salt Lake County suburb of Draper needs to be updated and expanded and is tying up valuable real estate.
The Prison Relocation Commission is looking for a new location that won’t face Draper’s problems in the future, but the facility can’t be so rural that it’s difficult for prison workers and volunteers to get there for or for prisoners to be transported to courthouses or hospitals.
But in Saratoga Springs, Eagle Mountain, Salt Lake City, West Jordan and Tooele County, residents and officials say a prison in or their cities will still cause problems.
In Tooele County, the prison commission is looking at land near the Miller Motorsports Park and an entertainment complex. That’s a key commercial area for the county, said Katrina Hill, a Stansbury Park resident and organizer with the group No Prison in Tooele County.
“What we’re afraid of is that other companies will not want to build next to a prison, so we’ll lose the very center of our valley as a commercial district,” Hill said.
That’s a similar argument officials made in the Utah County city of Saratoga Springs, where a proposed site has dropped out of the running. City leaders signed an agreement to instead to start annexing the 480-acre plot for a housing development.
The land is owned by Western States Ventures, a group of investors that includes Josh Romney, a Utah resident and son of former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.
In exchange for starting the annexation process, Western States Ventures withdrew their application with the prison committee.
That same day, city council members in nearby Eagle Mountain passed a resolution opposing a prison at another site south of that city. The resolution says the city is willing to spend $50,000 to fight it.
Mayor Chris Pengra said that his fast-growing city is looking at hiring a lobbyist to press their case to lawmakers, saying right now, their objections aren’t being heard.
Pengra said moving the prison nearby could limit businesses moving in and result in the same lost-opportunities that Utah officials worry about right now in Draper.
“They’d simply be displacing their problem, so to speak,” he said.
Stevenson said much of the controversy will go away on its own once the commission narrows their list to one or two sites.
“We’re trying not to get caught in the public fray of this until we can see which sites we really are going to have to deal with and which are going to go away,” he said.
After that, the commission will hold public meetings and hearings to explain what the facility would look like and hear feedback.
The Prison Relocation Commission is scheduled to meet again Dec. 22.
They’re expected to recommend a site or two sites to lawmakers sometime during the upcoming legislative session, which runs from January to mid-March. -AP
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