LAYTON — You don't always notice the lake, but it's unmistakably there. When the wind blows just right, when you look west from any place of significant elevation in Davis County, when extra heavy lake-effect snow falls, you sense the Great Salt Lake.

While Davis County Commissioner Dannie McConkie is fond of saying the county is the center of the universe, it's actually more of a global center for migratory birds.

Up to 6 million call the lake home at one time or another. Once, biologists counted 600,000 Wilson's phalaropes in a single day.

Those wetlands drew statewide attention in recent years after lawsuits were filed in January 2001 to stop construction of the Legacy Parkway, a highway first proposed in 1996 by then-Gov. Mike Leavitt, who said it would help ease traffic congestion along the Wasatch Front. The lawsuits centered around the highway's expected impact on the county's wetlands. A settlement last year has allowed preliminary construction to begin this summer.

Although the idea had been on county planners' minds even before the Legacy lawsuit was filed, Davis County didn't have any plan for managing and preserving habitat along the 27 miles of Great Salt Lake shoreline until July 2001. As human populations ballooned, county planners saw homes being constructed farther west and worried about the effects on wetlands.

Most land along the shoreline is either state- or privately owned. Farmland is interspersed with various other small parcels that could be developed, although most wetlands have high water tables. The state's Division of Wildlife Resources owns a large chunk, as well as The Nature Conservancy. Hunters own smaller portions.

By the end of the 1990s, The Nature Conservancy had started talks with county planners about the future of other stretches of the county shorelands. It was a topic that county planners had already been considering on their own.

Barry Burton, assistant director of community and economic development for Davis County, said he remembers sitting with his boss and discussing the future of their department.

The two men realized that "there were really a couple of things our grandchildren would thank us for," Burton said. "One was preserving the shorelands. The other was to protect the foothills and our access to the mountains."

A master plan

Burton and his boss, Wilf Sommerkorn, took the issue to the Davis County Council of Governments, made up of mayors in the county's 15 cities and the three county commissioners.