More than a dozen representatives, many accompanied by their spouses, boarded tour buses Monday morning on excursions from the proposed site of the Bear Lake Visitors Center in Rich County to the Brigham City Bird Refuge and dozens of stops in between.

An equally ambitious schedule begins this morning, when community members will continue to pitch concerns about education, transportation, public safety and much more to lawmakers.

Cache County Extension Agent Clark Israelsen said the guests on his leg of the tour talked about "two essential commodities," water and land, all day Monday. There are no easy answers to the challenge of spreading these limited resources over an expanding population, Israelsen said.

"We're losing 650 acres of agriculture land annually to development," he said, adding that the county has moved from being the largest agriculture producer to the fifth-largest in the state in recent years.

"That will likely continue unless we're able to come up with some kind of funding mechanism that will make agricultural land available to those who are willing to farm in this valley," Israelsen said.

Farmer Jon Meikle welcomed a group of legislators to his Smithfield home Monday evening, where members of the Cache Agriculture Advisory Board asked for state support of a proposal to preserve farmland with a voter-approved -cent local option sales tax.

"Farmland does not exist. It is a misnomer. It is a commodity sold at the highest price," Meikle told legislators as the sun set on his family farm Monday night.

"This is a resource that protects us and it's good for the rest of the state, as well, to have this resource here, but we need your help to put it together."

Aside from bill sponsor Craig Buttars, R-Lewiston, legislative support of the proposal was scarce Monday evening.

Senate President John Valentine said he would not support the local sales tax option, given the information presented by proponents Monday.

"That probably won't happen," he said. "It looks like they've adopted every single tax that's available and they have the highest tax possible and they want more tax authority on top of that."

Instead, Valentine recommended proponents pursue an agriculture preservation district, which would allow them to ask voters to increase property taxes to pay for open space preservation.

Nibley resident Joe Fuhriman, chairman of the Cache Agriculture Advisory Board, said he was disappointed that the group's latest in a decadelong series of open space preservation efforts was not well-received by state lawmakers.

Still, he called the meeting "advantageous" as a means of exploring other options, as well as raising awareness.

"This is a national problem," Fuhriman said. "We're losing farmland right and left. What's going to happen to our agriculture industry? We cannot be reliant on foreign agriculture."

Town meeting

Where: Eccles Theater, 43 S. Main St. in Logan.

When: 7 p.m. today. Open to the public.

On the agenda: Senate President John Valentine will present the Utah Tax Reform Task Force proposal to take a one-eighth-cent sales tax from the state's revenues and allocate it back to Utah communities to be spent at local discretion.

"One of the things that we have to do is to be able to make a single rate among all of the cities and counties throughout the state so we can compete in the international and national markets," Valentine said. "Right now, we end up with hundreds of rates in the state because each community has its own rate."