The ASSOCAITED Press | Posted: Tuesday, July 18, 2006 11:00 pm
Gov. Jon Huntsman on Tuesday helped launch a campaign by The Nature Conservancy to raise $43 million over four years for land and water conservation projects in Utah.
A report released by the Oquirrh Institute found that Utah was losing 15,000 acres of ranch and farm land and open space every year.
At that rate of development, Utah's populated Wasatch Front corridor will sprawl over 308 square miles -- the size of New York City -- by 2030, the report said.
The Nature Conservancy said the report highlighted the need to act quickly to preserve some of Utah's unspoiled lands. It said it had reached agreement to buy a conservation easement on a Cache County ranch for $3.7 million.
For the 6,700-acre Selman Ranch in the Little Bear River drainage, the conservancy still has to raise $2.3 million of the easement price.
The Selman Ranch holds breeding ground for the Columbian sharp-tailed grouse -- a bird that has already lost more than 96 percent of its historical habitat in Utah.
"We are excited about working with the conservancy on this easement because we feel like somewhere, sometime, someone needs to save a place for Utah's wildlife," rancher Bret Selman said Tuesday in a statement.
Terms of the deal will let the Selmans, third-generation sheep and cattle ranchers, to work the land and pass it on to future generations. It just can't be developed.
For its four-year campaign, the conservancy already has raised nearly $25 million from private and public sources.
Dave Livermore, the conservancy's Utah director, said the campaign works off an assessment of the state's most ecologically significant lands and waters.
"Utah is changing more quickly than any of us could have even dreamed possible thirty years ago," said Norma Matheson, widow of former Utah Gov. Scott Matheson and co-chairwoman of the conservancy's Living Lands & Waters Campaign. "We still have a chance, right now, to ensure that Utah remains one of the best places to live in the United States."
This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page D3.