Vernal residents who may have forgotten what it's like to live in a boom town will get a reminder in October - at least for 15 days.
Conversion of the LDS Church's historic Uintah Stake Tabernacle in Vernal into a temple is almost complete, and an open house is scheduled Oct. 11-25. The open house is expected to bring at least 10,000 people each day to the town of 7,600.The town's motels are already booked on some days. Twelve operators staffing a phone bank have given away 80,000 tickets to the open house, so far. The Vernal Area Chamber of Commerce logs about 30 calls a day from people planning for accommodations or side trips during their open-house visit.
Church representatives are arranging for large tents and awnings to shield visitors from the October weather, and the city may add a new traffic light near the temple to help regulate motorists driving near the temple.
"I think it's going to be the greatest thing we've had in this community," said Vernal Mayor Leonard E. Heeney. "We're going to doll up our streets and sidewalks. It'll be a little disruptive for a few days, but I think our people can stand it."
Heeney said traffic control will likely be the biggest problem. "We're telling our cops they won't be able to get time off." A new traffic signal would be Vernal's first off the main highways.
Tickets for the two Saturdays during the open house have been gone for some time. But Vernal-area church members toured the temple recently to test how long it would take to move visitors through the building. People moved through faster than expected, so the church is making additional tickets available, even on days that were previously full, said temple committee member Kathleen Irving.
That may boost the daily visitor count beyond the 10,000 projected. Add the church volunteers staffing the open house to Vernal's visitor count and the numbers climb higher still.
"We have more volunteers who will help out at this open house - ushering, security, parking, all those aspects - than live in this city," Irving said.
The Vernal temple will be the church's 10th in Utah and the first to derive from an existing structure. It was dedicated Aug. 24-25, 1907, and functioned as a center for Sunday worship during its life span as the Uintah Stake Tabernacle.
Judy Vierra, president of the Hotel/Motel Association of Vernal, said Vernal's tourist season typically thrives during the summer months and then vanishes after Labor Day. She and others in the hospitality industry are glad to see the open house in October and not during the summer when motel rooms are already booked.
Once dedicated, the temple will serve 42,000 church members in a geographic area that includes the western Colorado communities of Grand Junction, Craig and Meeker and the southwest corner of Wyoming, including Green River and Rock Springs.
Most temples the church has built during this century are located in larger population centers where throngs attending open houses and dedication ceremonies are more easily absorbed in the community. The Vernal temple's location in a smaller town separated by hours-long drives from other sizable communities also makes it unique - and will make the visiting crowds that much more noticeable.
Heeney said Vernal residents will likely be asked not to park on the street during the open house to give visitors more room. The city's Western Park rodeo and museum complex eight blocks from the temple may also be used as a remote parking site with shuttle buses to move open-house visitors around town.
Vernal has long been a tourist town and earned the designation as a boom town in the 1970s when foreign oil prices primed petroleum exploration in eastern Utah. The industry that brought the boom also left the greater Uintah Basin flat in the early 1980s when declining oil prices made exploration there too costly.
Vernal has since seen slow but steady growth and currently has a welcome mat out at 35 eateries, 14 lodging facilities and a score of other tourist-related industries.
Business leaders don't expect the temple to have a big long-term impact on Vernal, despite the temple's regional jurisdiction. "I talked to a gentleman from Rock Springs who said people would come in a bus (to the temple) and go home," Vierra said.