An urgent need for conservation

Eleven years have passed since then-Gov. Mike Leavitt convened a growth summit to direct special attention to the need to plan for orderly growth in Utah. It's disgraceful that, all this time later, a new governor has to draw attention once again to this need — disgraceful because lawmakers have largely ignored growth and conservation issues in the intervening decade.

And yet Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr.'s call last week for more money for the LeRay McAllister Critical Lands Conservation Fund was a good sign that at least someone in power is taking the need seriously. With any luck, state lawmakers will begin doing the same.

McAllister was a former state lawmaker who passed away in 2005. The fund named for him has been in existence since 1999. It was designed to protect watersheds, save dwindling agricultural land from development and help communities preserve open spaces. The money is appropriated annually by the Quality Growth Commission. However, lawmakers have continually starved this fund, often threatening not to fund it at all. While Arizona, Nevada and Colorado were appropriating hundreds of millions toward conservation in recent years, Utah most often put $2 million or less annually into the McAllister Fund.

Meanwhile, Utah's growth rate continues to rival that of those other states, and Utahns keep losing natural amenities that never can be restored. Tens of thousands of acres of agricultural land are developed each year in the state.

Huntsman's speech last week also kicked off a new project by The Nature Conservancy, arguably the most successful conservation group in Utah because it manages to avoid the political battles between conservatives and more traditional environmentalists. The new project, the Living Lands & Waters Campaign, will work to save family farms and ranches, as well as watersheds and natural areas important to the Wasatch Front and other parts of the state.

But his call for more attention to conservation by other state leaders is what deserves the most attention. Maybe now state leaders as a whole will finally get it.

Huntsman was not exactly plowing new ground. Neither was Leavitt more than a decade ago. Voters in Salt Lake County had a chance more than 30 years ago to pass a referendum that would have set aside land in the county for more parks and recreation sites. Unfortunately, that effort failed due to misinformation and scare tactics.