Few Wasatch Front residents would disagree that the cities and towns they live in are some of the most livable communities west of the Mississippi or anywhere in the world.
But will they be that way in 50 years if Utah's urban areas nearly triple in population as projected? How about a decade from now?Some Utahns concerned that paradise could be lost to the rapid current of growth are gathering here this week, just a few blocks west of the Mississippi, to share and learn from others across the country and globe who have the same worries.
Together, they hope to develop strategies and establish patterns of cooperation that will assist urban residents in elevating and retaining the quality of life they enjoy.
The Utah Transit Authority is a cosponsor of the third annual Rail-Volution transit and community development conference, a four-day event held at the St. Louis Hyatt Regency Hotel at historic Union Station.
Salt Lake City Mayor Deedee Corradini, UTA General Manager John Inglish and Sandy Mayor Tom Dolan are among the Utah officials scheduled to speak here. They will share the spotlight with a parade of noted politicians, planners, transit advocates, business executives and community activists, including Rep. Richard Gephardt, D-Mo., Federal Transit Administrator Gordon Linton and the Rev. Joseph Lowery, executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Coalition.
The theme of the conference is "building livable communities with transit," but some of the workshops and discussion groups will veer away from transportation topics and focus on growth and redevelopment issues.
Corradini is to participate in a Tuesday morning panel on urban reinvestment and present details of Salt Lake City's Gateway Project. Dolan, representing the Coalition for Utah's Future, was to moderate a Monday-morning panel on urban growth boundaries - a sprawl-reduction strategy popular in the Pacific Northwest.
Most of the 700 attending the conference are involved in some way with public transit. Six UTA board members and several UTA staffers are attending the conference, which received $10,000 from UTA and several other transit agencies to help cover expenses.
Salt Lake City has been tentatively selected to serve as host city for the conference in the fall of 2001, a year and a half after UTA's TRAX light-rail system is expected to be up and running.
"One of the values of this (conference) for us is networking with other groups," said Coralie Alder, a UTA community affairs specialist who helped organize this year's event.
"We'd like to put a lot of our energies into developing around our light-rail stations and building a system that works well with private development. (Attending the conference) are representatives from all over the country who have been doing this for years or are in the same phase (of light-rail construction) we are in and that networking helps us a lot."
David Lawrence, assistant city manager of Hillsboro, Ore., is one of many people UTA officials hope to talk to this week. Lawrence has helped coordinate development around the nine Hillsboro light-rail stations that will be part of the westside extension of Portland's MAX, scheduled to open next September.
Lawrence said if cities don't anticipate direct growth around light-rail stops, poor development choices could be made - jeopardizing the success of the entire area.
"If you are building a 25-unit housing development over the top of ground-floor retail, you want to make sure what gets built next to you is compatible with that," Lawrence said prior to Sunday's opening-night reception at the Gateway Arch.
St. Louis was chosen as the site for this year's gathering in part because of the much-celebrated success of its light-rail system, MetroLink. The $464 million, 17-mile line opened in August 1993 with daily ridership of 30,000 - more than double the number of passengers expected - and has continued to gain popularity.
MetroLink's western-most station is inside Lambert Airport, the country's eighth-busiest airport, and its terminus lies across the Mississippi in East St. Louis, Ill. The system provides a commuting alternate for suburban refugees fleeing congested I-70. Saturday and Sunday, it brought conference participants from the airport directly to Union Station.
"There are a lot of similarities between what we're doing in Salt Lake City and the St. Louis line," said UTA chief engineer Mike Allegra, who will moderate a Wednesday discussion on how the Dallas light-rail system (DART) was planned and developed. "(MetroLink) goes right in the heart of downtown St. Louis, it has connections to their retail and to their commercial and office areas)."
What is now the Rail-Volution conference began in the mid-1980s in the Portland area as a series of annual "rail summits" designed to bring residents, public officials and rail-transit advocates together to focus on quality-of-life issues. The local summits expanded to become the first national Rail-Volution conference in Portland in 1995. The second was held last year in Washington, D.C.
A special effort was made this year to include some of the traditional opponents of light rail and to invite residents from communities now considering - and perhaps resisting - a rail-transit project.
Paul M. Weyrich, former co-publisher of the Conservative Digest, will give a keynote address Tuesday revealing how mass transit can help achieve some conservative goals - including getting people off welfare. The conference has been expanded to include discussions about commuter rail, bus transit and community development.