MORGAN - Mountain Green, a bucolic gem of a community just 10 minutes from Snowbasin Ski Resort and 15 minutes from Ogden, has become a magnet for homebuilders in recent years.

Now residents, aided by design volunteers from the American Institute of Architects, are trying to ensure Mountain Green does not follow the course of other bedroom communities along interstate highways, whose streets are choked with truck stops, hotels, convenience stores and fast-food joints.

Instead, they envision a town center with a grocery store and civic buildings, small shops selling local goods and produce, green gathering spaces, trails, perhaps some condos, townhouses or bungalows.

Over four 16-hour-plus days last week, architects and long-range planners from Arizona, Michigan and Utah helped residents and civic leaders crystallize their dreams for such a town center and put it on paper.

The result is a report that will guide Morgan County's planning for the unincorporated Mountain Green, home to an estimated 1,500 people.

"What they've given to us is a beginning. We're the ones who have the obligation to move this forward," Morgan County Councilman Sid Creager said Saturday night at a meeting where the Design Assistance Team (DAT) presented its report.

"There can be no more noble gift than to give your children a town center that is walkable, friendly and human scaled," James Abell, the Tempe, Ariz.-based architect who led the team, told more than 100 residents who gathered to hear the report.

The focus on Mountain Green was the brainchild of Tony Pantone, president of the AIA's Northern Utah Section and a member of the county's planning commission.

Though the county's master plan calls for a town center in Mountain Green, where the only retail business at present is a service station and convenience store, there was no money to hire a consultant.

Abell figures the project saved the county $50,000 in consultant fees and six months' time. The professionals donated their time, but the community raised $25,000 for direct costs.

AIA has been providing similar gratis work across the country for more than four decades, but this year, the 150-year-old AIA's Blueprint for America program aims to do 150 community service projects.

The Mountain Green DAT was the Northern Utah Section's "gift" to the community, Pantone said.

The project began nine months ago, when a local steering committee was formed.

Last Wednesday, the team hit the ground, meeting with farmers, developers, wildlife biologists, school and airport board members, and civic leaders.

On Thursday night, more than 200 people crowded into the county council chambers to put in their two-bits.

Saturday night, members of the DAT team said all the groups shared a common goal for Mountain Green: that it retain its rural appeal, integrity and sweeping views of the backside of the Wasatch Range.

"I was so charmed by the woman who didn't want the phoney blacksmith shop," said Abell. Any development, he said, has to "ring true."

Karen Wikstrom, of Wikstrom Economic Consultants in Salt Lake City and a member of the design team, said Mountain Green residents clearly feel connected to the land.

"We heard over and over, 'This place feeds my soul,' " she said. One woman likened the views from her window to " 'putting gold in my heart,' " she said.

Wikstrom suggested the town center could connect residents to some aspect of northern Utah tradition, such as fur-trapping or pioneer days, and that residents consider asking The Browning Co., a worldwide gun manufacturer based in Mountain Green, to move into the center.

Craig Widmier, a landscape architect from Layton who was on the team, said the neighborhoods could be connected to the town center by trails for walkers, horseback riders and bicyclists. The community's many streams could provide perfect corridors for trails as well as opportunities to teach about riparian habitats, he said.

Architect Celeste Novak of Ann Arbor, Mich., said, the vision the team settled on would reflect what Mountain Green has always been: a mountain village that embraces nature.

The plan would have the Utah Department of Transportation put a planned new interchange on Interstate 84 where it would intersect with an extended Trappers Loop Road. Another road would split from Trappers Loop, cross a covered bridge over Cottonwood Creek and into the town center.

But in between the freeway and the town center, horses and cattle would continue to graze in the meadows, she said.

Resident Elizabeth Chan praised the team Saturday.

"I think you hit the spot. Nature is why everyone is here," she said.

The Design Assistance Team included James Abell, a Tempe, Ariz., architect and landscape architect; Celeste Novak, an Ann Arbor, Mich., architect; Karen Wikstrom, of Wikstrom Economic Consultants in Salt Lake City; Craig Widmier, a landscape architect in Layton; Troy Cook, a landscape architect and planner with Design Workshop in Salt Lake City; and Ted Knowlton, who is the executive director of Envision Utah.

Architect Bob Herman of Ogden helped the team as did four students from the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture in Wisconsin and Arizona; two students from Utah State University landscape architecture program; and two students from the University of Utah College of Architecture & Planning. Morgan High School drafting students made a model of a town center.