This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Nobody is accusing state Rep. Brad Wilson of having pulled off any secret insider deals. Nobody thinks he was trading on any confidential information he may have received while serving on the Utah Prison Relocation Commission.
On the contrary, everything that Wilson's company, Destination Homes, did in buying a tract that later turned into a cluster of townhomes, on a lot very near the long-time state prison site in Draper, could have been done by any number of people who bothered to follow the goings on in and near the Legislature.
Because anyone who was at all attuned to what has happening, what was clearly going to happen once the Legislature created a special panel known as the Prison Relocation Commission, could have made the same move Wilson did.
If, of course, they were already in the real estate developer business, as was Wilson and a significant number of his fellow Utah lawmakers.
It should have been clear to anyone paying the least bit of attention that the fix was in, even though there was nothing secret about it. The kind of fix that appears to have been fully legal, but also the kind of deal that can only make the tens of thousands of non-real estate brokers in the area look like chumps.
That the Legislature, led by Draper's own, House Speaker Greg Hughes, was hot to move the prison somewhere else and turn the 700-acre prison site into something else, something that would create a lot of wealth for anyone who had a hand in transforming it from so much tax-exempt government property to a development of either thousands more homes, dozens more shopping centers and/or a high-tech office park.
Wilson and other politicians who are involved in land development around the old prison site deny any conflict of interest, and certainly deny that they did anything illegal. Wilson notes that his development, Sunflower Crossing, was all envisioned, planned, constructed and sold before the body he was a member of selected a prison site. So, he argues, it's not as if the value of the property he bought and sold as a developer increased because of what he did as a lawmaker.
Maybe not. Maybe it shot up in value because of what other members of the Legislature did, what everyone knew they were going to do, and Wilson was just one of those people who were in a position to take advantage of it.
Even if there was no insider trading going on, Wilson's project — undisclosed during all the prison deliberations — suggests once again that the whole idea behind moving the prison, apparently to a swampy area near the airport, was pursued not so much for any improvements it might make to the state's criminal justice system but for vast expanse of open dirt that would be left behind.