Fillmore City officials feeling heat from lagging permit approvals, lack of communication
As the national and global economy begins to face serious headwinds—inflation, rising energy prices, supply chain disruptions and persistent labor shortages—the rural Utah economy has an opportunity to change its fortunes for the better, said Gov. Spencer Cox, who was in Millard County Monday to meet with business leaders and elected officials.
He said unemployment in Utah is the lowest in the country, tied with Nebraska. He said growth in the state’s gross domestic product—a measure of the dollar value of total economic activity—leads the entire nation.
China’s inability to get COVID under control, he said, opens opportunities for manufacturers to return from Asia en masse and potentially seek resettlement in the Beehive State.
Growth is already poised to change Millard County by leaps and bounds. The giant, multi-billion-dollar transition at Intermountain Power Project is often cited alongside the Advanced Clean Energy Storage hydrogen hub next door. But there are any number of significant developments, large and small, set to change the county’s communities for good.
One developer recently purchased $5 million worth of property in Fillmore, for example, with plans for a 48-home subdivision off the city’s golf course, and possibly more. A Moab developer recently announced plans for a massive modular housing factory near Fillmore’s airport. A new RV park is nearing 60 percent completion on Fillmore’s northwest side, with talk of even more development nearby in the near future.
But with growth comes growing pains.
And a significant question being asked more and more frequently of late is whether the area and its leaders are truly ready for what’s coming.
Some developers—the tip of the proverbial iceberg— are starting to demand more attention from city councils and planning bodies, who are all essentially volunteer public servants with varying levels of expertise and interests.
It’s not been exactly smooth sailing—and with more and more development in the near future, choppier seas probably lie ahead.
Terry Messersmith can tell you all about it.
He’s the developer of Fillmore’s East Ridge Estates. He started—and nearly went bankrupt—in 2005 developing property in Fillmore City. Today he’s building the new RV park on the city’s northwest side. He’s also got other plans in the works, including locating a construction outfit in the city.
At last week’s city council meeting, where Messersmith sought a waiver of the city’s curb, gutter and sidewalk requirements, he made his frustrations with the city known.
He made it clear he was not happy with the pace of building permit approvals—he’s more than half finished with phase one of his RV park and still has no permit for it. He’s frustrated that he attends city meetings, thinks a decision has been made, or is imminent, only to find out it isn’t. He’s even frustrated that he’s told he can get any public records he needs—he recently asked to see a copy of plans for a force sewer main near his development—only to be told later he needs to request those through GRAMA’s open records portal, something his attorney told him was unnecessary.
“I’ve got new plans submitted to the city, hoping to hear back for an approval or disapproval. I don’t know what that process is. One of my other frustrations is why does it take so long to get through the approval process with plans here? I submitted originals two and a half months ago. We received feedback on them. It took about six weeks to get feedback. Within two weeks we had corrected all the correction issues. We resubmitted a couple of weeks ago and I still haven’t heard anything back,” Messersmith told city council members last week.
For developers like Messersmith, time is money.
“I’m paying a thousand dollars a day just in interest. At some point somebody has got to be more timely than maybe we’ll look at it a week from now,” he said.
Messersmith has other issues with the city, too.
Last week he also complained about the poor state of a city-owned road near his development. Cracked and “alligatored,” he suggested an inch-and-a-half overlay be applied to better support semis driving in the area and heavy RVs he expects to use the road in the near future. City officials said they’d take a look but demurred about doing the overlay. Complicating the issue is a patch of UDOT property nearby that semis regularly use as a parking lot. Another issue complicating the ordeal is that most drivers don’t even know where the city road is since it isn’t really evident—it basically passes in front of the Shell Station and Carl’s Jr. near where the RV park is being built off Cedar Mountain Road.
The developer didn’t come to the council meeting about the road in the first place, but was on the agenda instead seeking a waiver on city curb and gutter requirements. Both Delta and Fillmore require any new construction to include them, even when neighboring lots remain empty fields with no sidewalks or other such infrastructure; developers aren’t excited about them since they add an additional layer of costs to projects, but cities require them for such purposes as drainage, safety and beautification.
Fillmore City Attorney Elise Harris advised council members to keep in mind that if they granted a waiver to Messersmith, they would be in effect granting waivers to every future developer as well.
“I don’t think it’s in the city’s best interest to arbitrarily waive curb and gutter,” she said, adding that the only reason waivers should ever be made is for the health and well-being of citizens.
Council members ended up agreeing with Harris, but in a bid to keep Messersmith happy decided to defer the installation of curb and gutters until 2027 or when the developer begins the second phase of his RV park.
“When I started this process, I was assured that there was no problem to get released from curb, gutter and sidewalk,” Messersmith said. “And we’ve had this conversation here multiple times and it just seems like on a constant basis what we say this month we don’t hold to next month. If the city wants to hold me to one standard, I should be able to reciprocate… to hold the city to the same standard.”
By the end of the discussion Messersmith was virtually resigned to just building the curb and gutter anyway.
“I may just put in curb and gutter so that I’m not indebted to the city over this,” Messersmith said.
As the developer argued his case before council members, Lauri Mathews, a broker with Signature Real Estate in Fillmore, was talking and texting with officials from Golden Gate, developer of a planned convenience store and fuel center near the sheriff’s office.
She said that developer, too, was mulling seeking a waiver from the city’s curb, gutter and sidewalk requirements.
“So Golden Gate was going to ask for a waiver, but they are no longer going to,” she told council members. “The only other thing, their frustration level with the time it takes to get an answer, extremely upset. The exact words were that they have worked with over 200 other cities and Fillmore City has been the most difficult. It has taken longer than any other out of 200.”
Asked what specifically she thought they meant, she said “the permitting process. They wanted to move dirt months ago. They waited and waited and waited for answers…they were upset over a five-week delay over an answer. They can’t understand why it is taking so long.”
Mathews is no stranger to issues involving developers and Fillmore.
She said she was frustrated two years ago by the pace of city decision-making when she was building her own home. But more than that she’s seen a lot of businesses express interest in the city only to split after careful consideration.
“Fillmore City has lost so many opportunities over the last 17 years for businesses to come in. I have been told on multiple occasions that, well, Fillmore doesn’t want us. And they leave and they move. There are some very big projects that would have been very beneficial to us, to the county, to the city,” the real estate professional said.
Even on property Messersmith is developing, a succession of builders came and went before he decided to push ahead. He said he is in it for the long haul, but also that he could have had an easier time in another community.
“More times than not I could have pulled out of here and been better ahead. If my past track record doesn’t have any good faith attached to it, well then I’m sorry for that. But the fact of the matter is I have stayed true and strong to Fillmore City,” he said.
Mayor Mike Holt apologized for all delayed decisions and piled up frustrations. He suggested the city had been idle so long, awaiting growth, that was now not totally prepared for it.
Council members, too, apologized profusely, said they knew the problems all to well and repeated promises to make things smoother—one idea was to work closer with the county’s planning professional or depend less on an outside engineering firm for some permitting.
But it’s not just Fillmore dealing with these growing pains.
Even the county has been accused of failing to prepare.
During a county planning commission meeting this past winter, for example, a group of local business owners sought permission to build a massive RV development near several farms that sit along 4500 South outside Delta.
The crew was obviously attempting to take advantage of the severe housing shortage and lack of short-term rentals available in the face of a deluge of construction workers expected to arrive when work ramps up at IPP. Numerous ordinance changes across the county and cities have been mulled or made in the last year getting ready for their arrival.
But the county doesn’t allow RV park development—only single-family dwellings—so the developers wanted to be permitted instead under the county’s definition of “campground.” That forced county officials to scramble and redefine what a “campground” is. The project itself created not a small amount of consternation from the farmers who’d be affected by such a development.
While the project seemed doomed from the start—the plan was to turn the “campground” into a subdivision of sorts after the workers left, though water and sewer issues were a persistent question among neighbors—a speech by one of its partners, local businessman Steele Weston, of 2019’s big pig farm debate fame, was animated, to say the least. Weston argued that local leadership was lacking, that a few thousand construction workers would soon arrive with no place to live. They will have to go somewhere, he said, so why not there. Otherwise, they could crowd the fields around Delta, or even along the streets or in nearby communities, like Lynndyl or Leamington or Oak City.
What then, he asked?
The room fell silent. It was a good question. It begat another: Is the area prepared for what’s coming?
