Not many towns have dairy farms inside their city limits.
Morgan, population 2,800, is an exception - boasting two - though their days might be numbered as developers press for more places to build houses in the small county seat just 30 minutes up Weber Canyon from Ogden and the overcrowded Wasatch Front.Cows vs. condominiums is one way to distill the big issue of contention these days in Morgan County, where a near-overnight boom, similar to one in its sister counties to the south, Wasatch and Summit, seems to be unfolding in a slow but steady motion.
"The geography makes it difficult to create roads, develop lots, put in sewer and water lines and so on," said Morgan County commissioner Mike McMillan, by way of explaining why Morgan County is not as awash in new construction as other communities along the back of the Wasatch Mountains.
Local governments are considering approving 100 new houses in and around the cities of Morgan and Mountain Green, a number that would barely turn heads anyplace else but has added to an ongoing and sometimes caustic debate over how much growth is good.
"The last person who comes in wants to close the gate," said Ken Adams, editor and publisher of the Morgan County News, repeating a phrase uttered in recent times in any number of towns at the edge of the Salt Lake metropolitan area.
A county government spat involving allegations that certain public officials showed favoritism toward certain developers created enough of a public outcry earlier this year to spark an investigation by the Attorney General's Office, which found no criminal wrongdoing. The topic has hardly died, however, as readers of Adams' newspaper continue to submit often-rambling letters to the editor containing more charges and counter-charges.
Circulation of the 1,700-subscriber weekly is up, said Marie Adams, office manager and wife of the editor-publisher: "We get five new ones a week."
The controversy detailed in the newspaper is part of a larger phenomenon.
Morgan in the 1990s has been discovered at last by the masses, particularly those to the immediate west, where tract housing and traffic jams have given residents of urban Davis and Weber counties pause over their congested style of living.
The dream of the common suburbanite, said Curtis P. Jones, a longtime farmer in nearby Por-ter-ville and more recently certified Realtor, is to find a patch of high-country ground and come home to the mountains."People who move up here want to be able to say, `Here I am. I got my wife and my kids and my land and my dog and an acre, and I can walk outside and look at it and know I got something,' " Jones said. "They get off work, drive into a nice valley and nobody tells them what to do."
It sounds good on paper, but there's trouble in paradise, where the population has grown 21 percent since 1990 while Morgan County's tax base has stayed relatively stagnant.
Public services lag behind growth, a problem that appears most acutely now in an outbreak of subdivisions that rely on septic tanks instead of community sewer systems. This occurs despite the delicate hydrology of an area that straddles the Weber River, flowing west into Weber County and feeding a number of culinary systems along the Wasatch Front.
Concerns aren't just with infrastructure.
Adams, who works full time as the local high-school guidance counselor when he isn't editing the newspaper, said an incursion of newcomers from more urban Utah cities has strapped local schools. The impact in the classroom surfaces both in numbers and societal effects.
"All kids are good, and we enjoy having them," Adams said. "But you don't solve problems simply by moving or running away from them."
Meanwhile, the escalating cost of real estate has priced many young families out of the market, said Jann Smith, who serves a dual role as economic development director to the city and the county.
Modest building lots start at around $40,000, and there aren't enough of them to go around.
When developers of a new proj-ect called Trapper's Point announced last year they were putting 30 lots north of Mountain Green on the market for $45,000 apiece, it caused a land rush outside the town of 1,900.
"People actually stood in line the night before to buy them," McMillan said.
Fewer than 20 houses are currently on the market in the entire county, said Curtis, understating the situation as "strictly a seller's market."
A three-bedroom, two-bathroom home on a half-acre listed the other day for $165,900. A similar house on 11 acres was advertised at $329,000. In Morgan proper, the owner of a smaller dwelling was asking $129,900 and a small but stately house at the end of a cul de sac bordering an open field was priced at $155,000.
"Add that to the fact there aren't many good jobs," Smith said.
Per-capita personal income was $17,200 in Morgan County in 1995, according to the most recent figures from the Governor's Office of Planning and Budget. In Summit County, Utah's most affluent community, it was $28,900 by comparison. The state average was $18,226.
Most local work is in the low-paying trade sector of the economy, and some 90 percent of the work force commutes to jobs elsewhere, in Ogden, Davis County or Salt Lake City, less than an hour away.
This means Morgan County suffers from the fiscal anemia that hurts many bedroom communities - an out-of-kilter economy that doesn't have enough corporate taxpayers, though there are a few.
Holman Industries, east of Morgan, makes cement and employs 104. Browning Inc., the weapons manufacturer, has a payroll of 180 at its Mountain Green administrative offices and bow factory. Numerous small agricultural operations are still in business and a mink-farming industry that goes back generations continues to employ a handful of families.
"The thing Morgan's got to figure out is how to bring in some light industry," Smith said.
"We get queries," she added, but most manufacturers come to town asking what tax breaks or taxpayer-funded infrastructure they might be rewarded for locating their operations in Morgan County.
The answer is "very little," Smith said, because the county with its small budget is in no position to offer handouts.
Thus, the only growth is in population.
Darren Dawson, a 30-year-old rancher and lifelong resident of the area, said it's almost time for the city to put in its first stoplight, at an intersection that handles traffic from the high school and the town's only bank.
"Used to be there were no houses along the drive to work," said Dawson, a former commuter to the Wasatch Front. "Now they're popping up all over the place."
The trend looks as if it will continue.
"With all the talk of the I-15 expansion (in Salt Lake County), just this spring there have been a lot of inquiries from Salt Lake people wondering how far it is from here to downtown or the airport," Smith said.
The answer? Less than an hour.
Nonetheless, progress so far has been slow in coming, mirroring a pace established 140 years ago when the state's Mormon pioneers overlooked the valley. Morgan is one of only a few communities in Utah that was not established at the direction of the Salt Lake-based The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Instead, free-lance settlers climbed the then-precarious Weber Canyon and established roots on their own, eventually profiting from the arrival of the transcontinental railroad, which barreled west on its historic way to Promontory.
Today nine freight trains rumble through Morgan, but none stop. The county, one of Utah's smallest in land surface (603 square miles), is defined largely by the little towns that dot the corridor of I-84, whose motorists generally skip Morgan.
Those who stop find more than is obvious from the interstate. The town has an old-fashioned friendliness that manifests itself in a popular local habit of waving at fellow motorists and passers-by. In some neighborhoods, children on bicycles outnumber cars. A lunch of chicken-fried steak at the Country Cafe on Commercial Street is less than $6. Cattails and birds of prey mark the boundaries of wetlands west of town.
There are small-town inconveniences too. Morgan has only one automated teller machine, at the grocery store, and it charges users $2 a pop.
The community has neither the bustle of Heber City nor the pretension of Park City.
It's also missing the sprawling, hillside development so apparent in Summit and Wasatch counties, thanks to a local 1978 land-use code still on the books and considered something of a prescient, before-its-time policy.
In Morgan County, mountainside cabins cannot be built unless they are accompanied by 160 open acres.
"Some people think it's old and obsolete. It's not," said county commissioner Jan Turner, who noted that much of the rugged landscape of Morgan County is a watershed of one tributary or another of the Weber River.
That part of local zoning ordinances is being augmented now by stricter codes placed on flatter lands, imposed town by town and aimed at filling a void that has existed for years in such areas but has only recently become evident.
Turner, a dairyman who has 200 acres and milks 120 cows, insisted that development has occurred more slowly in Morgan and environs than in similar areas because of deeply entrenched traditions against it.
"People here are of a mind-set that they love the earth," Turner said. "There's a lot of farmers who think that way and would love to pass it onto someone else."
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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
High country sprawl
The biggest change since pioneers settled the area 130 years ago has come to the back of the Wasatch Mountains, where once-obscure locales like Morgan, Kimball Junction and Midway have become popular and booming respites from the urban rat race.
Morgan County
Population: 1990 . . . . 5,550
1996 . . . . 6,693
21% Increase
Square miles: 603