This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2015, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Sen. Orrin Hatch's proposal to expand the Utah Test and Training Range (UTTR) will not only assist our military in testing new generations of aircraft and weapons systems. It will also create revenue for Utah's public school endowment through the consolidation of school trust lands located within the UTTR.
About 80,000 acres of school trust lands are now inside the UTTR expansion area. Like other state school trust lands, these parcels are managed by the School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration (SITLA) to generate funds for the Permanent School Fund, a perpetual endowment that provides annual dividends to every K-12 public and charter school in Utah.
School trust dividends, $45.8 million this year, are allocated each year at the school level by councils of parents and teachers for each school's particular academic needs.
The state trust lands within the UTTR will be transferred to the federal government as part of the UTTR expansion to prevent future uses on the lands that could be incompatible with defense activities. In exchange, Utah's school trust will receive about 15 areas of federal lands elsewhere in the west desert area that are now managed by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Like several other large land exchanges between SITLA and the BLM in the last 20 years, the purpose of the land exchange will be to consolidate school trust lands in more manageable blocks, while reducing the inefficient "checkerboard" land ownership pattern. These exchanges have played a large role in growing the Permanent School Fund from less than $100 million in 1994 to the current $2.2 billion.
Land parcels that SITLA will acquire from BLM in the exchange include lands adjacent to an existing limestone mine in Millard County, lands with industrial development potential north of Delle in Tooele County and surplus BLM parcels in the Tooele Valley. Also notable are parcels in Beaver County with known geothermal resources and a large parcel in Millard County adjacent to a proposed photovoltaic solar facility, which will supplement SITLA's rapidly growing portfolio of renewable energy leases. As part of the exchange, SITLA will also convey to BLM state land inholdings in the Cedar Mountains Wilderness, which were not exchanged when this wilderness area was created by Congress in 2006.
Hatch's legislation contains requirements that all lands being exchanged be appraised to determine fair market value. If trust lands in the UTTR expansion appraise for less than the BLM lands, SITLA will be required to convey additional state trust lands inside the Red Cliffs National Conservation Area near St. George to BLM for conservation management.
The current exchange is quite similar to the 2001 West Desert exchange, which gave BLM ownership of all state trust lands then located in BLM wilderness study areas in the west desert, while conveying usable lands to Utah's school trust. That exchange generated tens of millions of dollars for Utah schools over the intervening 15 years, while supporting local jobs and economic development in rural Utah. The expansion of UTTR, together with the proposed land exchange, will continue this beneficial process.
Brad C. Smith is Utah Superintendent of Public Instruction. Kevin S. Carter is director of Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration.