Polygamist sect's finances are murky
Assessed value of the property now: $20.5 million.
How did members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints do it?
Sweat equity was clearly one factor. The men quarried limestone themselves from the hard ground and built the enormous homes with their own hands, using skills learned at construction companies close to the sect's main base of operations, on the Arizona-Utah line.
But as for where they got the money for building materials, dump trucks, rock-cutting equipment and other supplies, that is still something of a mystery.
"Who funded it? We're investigating. That's for dang sure," said Jeff Shields, a court-appointed lawyer studying the sect's finances.
Some suspect the FLDS supplied money to Eldorado from a $114 million trust fund that once included all the homes and land in the side-by-side FLDS towns of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz. Money may also have come from construction businesses and other ventures run by sect members, including an aircraft wheel and brake manufacturer in Nevada that holds a $1.2 million Pentagon contract, and an engineering firm that landed $11.3 million in work from Las Vegas water authorities.
The group bought the property for $412 an acre in 2003 and rapidly turned it into a self-contained home for roughly 700 people, with rows of planted vegetables and other farming enterprises, a dairy that produces milk and cheese, and shops for cabinetmaking and other woodworking — all to supply the ranch, not to turn a profit on the outside.
Enormous homes went up in a matter of weeks, and when the temple was built, at least 200 men swarmed to the property to cut rock from the soil and assemble the gleaming 80-foot house of worship, said J.D. Doyle, a pilot who has taken hundreds of photos of the ranch's development from his small plane. With the natural clay soil useless for farming, sect members brought in black dirt to grow vegetables.
"They worked around the clock. They can put up a 21,000-square-foot house in 2 1/2 weeks. Move in and have it perfect," Doyle said. "It was amazing to us to watch them do this."
The sect paid $424,000 in property taxes last year, or about 18 percent of Schleicher County's annual revenue. It is the third-biggest taxpayer in the county, behind two pieces of land that produce oil. Although FLDS is a church, it never sought tax-exempt status in Texas or in other Southwest states in which it operates.
Recent comments
maybe you should do a little research on who pays taxes. I believe...
um? | May 16, 2008 at 11:38 a.m.
the FLDS here in Utah/arizona have avoided paying protey taxes for...
um... | May 16, 2008 at 9:49 a.m.
Like a hot fudge sundae, with vanilla ice cream, sweet hot fudge,...
Good and Bad | May 16, 2008 at 7:13 a.m.
