LeRay McAllister Critical Land Conservation Fund

LeRay McAllister Critical Land Conservation Fund is sponsored by Utah Quality Growth Commission. The LeRay McAllister Critical Land Conservation Fund provides matching funds for the preservation and restoration of critical open lands, wildlife habitat, watershed protection areas, scenic and historic lands, and agricultural lands in Utah.

Utah Quality Growth Commission | Promoting Conservation and Responsible Development The Utah Quality Growth Commission announces the opening of the 2019 application cycle. Pre-Applications are due Friday, May 17th by 5:00 PM . The LeRay McAllister Critical Land Conservation Fund provides grants to preserve or restore critical open or agricultural land in Utah.

Matching funds are required . Eligible applicants are counties, cities, towns, the Utah Department of Natural Resources, the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food, and charitable organizations that qualify as tax exempt under Section 501 (c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. Staff may be able to assist landowners to find an eligible partner if one has not already been identified.

Applying involves several steps. Before starting, be sure you have read all the documents listed here: Schedule for 21st Application Cycle Application Form and Evaluation Criteria McAllister Fund Defining Principles It is important that you know what will be required before a grant can be awarded so that you will be prepared to submit the required documentation. THIS IS A COMPETITIVE PROGRAM – UP TO $3.

4 MILLION IS AVAILABLE. For information and application forms or if you have questions, contact: Evan Curtis, State Planning Coordinator Governor’s Office of Management and Budget Suite 150, Utah State Capitol Building, Salt Lake City, Utah 84114 Phone: (801) 538-1424, E-mail: ecurtis@utah.

gov QGCPreApplicationForm2019 QGCApplicationChecklist2019 QGC21cycleApplicationFormAndCriteria Thank you for visiting the website of the Utah Quality Growth Commission. We have received some inquiries regarding the availability of funding through the LeRay McAllister Critical Land Conservation Fund.

Unfortunately, all of the remaining funding was cut during the 2018 legislative session and no new funding was appropriated for the coming fiscal year. This means that we will not be able to accept any project applications at this time. Please check back next year.

The Utah Quality Growth Commission announces the opening of a special application cycle. Pre-Applications are due Friday, June 2, 2016 by 5:00 PM . The LeRay McAllister Critical Land Conservation Fund provides grants to preserve or restore critical open or agricultural land in Utah.

Matching funds are required. Eligible applicants are counties, cities, towns, the Utah Department of Natural Resources, the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food, and charitable organizations that qualify as tax exempt under Section 501 (c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. Staff may be able to assist landowners to find an eligible partner if one has not already been identified.

Applying involves several steps. Before starting, be sure you have read all the documents listed here: Schedule for 20th Application Cycle Application Form and Evaluation Criteria McAllister Fund Defining Principles It is important that you know what will be required before a grant can be awarded so that you will be prepared to submit the required documentation. THIS IS A COMPETITIVE PROGRAM.

THERE IS $500,000 AVAILABLE for general applicants and $169,000 AVAILABLE for projects designated for sage grouse habitat. For information and application forms or if you have questions, contact: Evan Curtis, State Planning Coordinator Governor’s Office of Management and Budget Suite 150, Utah State Capitol Building, Salt Lake City, Utah 84114 Phone: (801) 538-1424, E-mail: ecurtis@utah.

gov QGC16ApplicationChecklist QGC20cycleApplicationFormAndCriteria The Utah Quality Growth Commission met today to review recommendations it will make to the Legislative Commission for Stewardship of Public Lands. Agenda and packets are attached.

For a recording visit the State’s Public Notice website meeting-packet On December 20, 2016, the Utah State Legislature’s Commission for the Stewardship of Public Lands asked the Utah Quality Growth Commission to report on the work the Commission has done regarding watershed management.

John Bennett, Commission Staff, and Commission Member Randy Parker, of the Utah Farm Bureau, addressed the Commission For the Stewardship of Public Lands. To listen to the meeting, and to view the packet and other information, go to the Commission For the Stewardship of Public Lands page here. http://le.

utah. gov/asp/interim/Commit. asp?

Year=2016&Com=SPESPL Following their presentation, the legislators asked Mr. Bennett and Commissioner Parker to prepare some recommendations for the legislature to consider. The Commission will begin this work at its next meeting to be held on Thursday, January 19, 2017 at 9:00 AM in the Seagull Room in the East Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill.

Salt Lake City Public Utilities sent the Quality Growth Commission several articles showing that Forest Health and Forest Health are critical to watersheds. Recently, the Commission has come under fire for its watershed work. The Commission wanted to ensure that the record is complete.

Attached you will find: Salt Lake City Watershed Plan, 1999 North Slope Watershed Plan, 2013-17, from Colorado Springs, included as an example of a plan that promotes active management of the watershed and delinates projects to be completed, collaborations to be undertaken, partnerships to be created and nurtured, funding sources to be tapped, etc. Article entitled Protecting Forested Watersheds is Smart Economics for Water Utilities, AWWA Journal, Sept.

2014 Center for Watershed Protection: Forests and Drinking Water, http://www. cwp. org The Lost Narrative: Ecosystem Service Narratives and the Missing Wasatch Watershed Conservation Story, Blanchard, Vira, and Briefer, Journal of Ecosystem Services, Sept.

16, 2015, Pgs 105-111 These articles all make the case that a well managed, and healthy forest is critical to fully functioning forest watershed. The Commission desires to understand the specific management actions being undertaken in the Wasatch Canyons to ensure forest health, and fully functioning watersheds. That is not an unreasonable question.

protecting-forested-watersheds-awwa-sept-2014-1 lost-narrative northslopewatershedplan salt_lake_city_watershed_management_plan_-_1999_final center-for-watershed-protection The Utah Quality Growth Commission will meet on Friday, October 28, 2916 at 10:30 AM in the Copper Room in the East Senate Building on Capitol Hill.

The purpose of this meeting will be primarily to review and approve two projects funded by the LeRay McAllister program. For those who have been following this blog, we have taken our watershed work off the agenda for this meeting. There was a lot of rancor developing around this work, and we felt it wise to let it cool down for a while.

Materials for the meeting on Friday are attached. qgcagenda102816 The Utah Quality Growth Commission has spent the last couple of months reviewing the management of utah watersheds and related issues. Most of our work has focused on the management of the Wasatch Canyon Watersheds.

We have produced a draft report to the Legislature and we are seeking comment from interested persons. The report is available here: Please send your comments to John Bennett, Commission Staff at jbennett@utah. gov. We intend to hold one more meeting to review this document and hear other testimony before presenting our findings, and any recommendations to the Utah State Legislature.

Any comments will need to be submitted to John Bennett by Wednesday September 21, 2016 at 5:00 PM. Sandy City Public Utilities Director Shane Pace sent the following e-mail and information to the Quality Growth Commission ahead of the Commission’s August 26, 2016 meeting. The message was addressed to John Bennett, Staff of the Utah Quality Growth Commission.

Mr. Bennett: My name is Shane Pace and I am the Public Utilities Director for Sandy City. I am aware of your upcoming commission meeting and the discussion on Watershed Protection. I am a member of the Utah Water Quality Board and we are meeting at the same time as your commission meeting.

I have attached a letter and some attachments that I would ask you to share with the Commission in order to provide feed back on this issue. It is my hope that a reasonable and fair discussion can occur on this important issue. Public Utilities Director The following four documents were attached to his e-mail.

Letter First Class City Watershed Ordinance Forests & Drinking Water Article In response to Mr. Pace’s letter attached above, John Bennett wrote the following e-mail response. Shane, thanks for taking the time to write to me. I read your letter with interest, I am forwarding it to the members of the Commission for their review.

I appreciate your sharing with me the ordinance and the material. In the letter you implied that I argued that landowners should not be subject to watershed regulation because they do not get to vote in city elections. As is the case with so much of the discussion around the governance of these canyons, this information is incomplete, and misleading.

I am an ardent conservationist. I hold my conservation successes up against anyones. In my career I have been a big part of protecting more than 100,000 acres of land in Utah.

I believe that we need to have watershed protection ordinances that are reasonable and effective. Every landowner recreationist, or city worker whether resident or not, should be subject to these reasonable ordinances, but those who are residents of Salt Lake County should also have a say in how these ordinances are writtern as the land impacted is within the boundaries of the county and not the city.

I am also a strong proponent of representative government. If my public school education serves me well, ensuring such representation was the very point of the American Revolution. Shane, like me, I am sure you believe in representative government.

I know Sandy City officials, and have a great deal of respect for them. They were elected to represent the residents of Sandy. Your main argument tries to compare apples to oranges and condemn the apples that the Quality Growth Commission is examining because they are not the oranges you describe in your letter.

To mix metaphors, you have created a straw man, defined him as the Quality Growth Commission, and then begun to beat him. That is unfair, and does not lead to a reasonable outcome.

The point I made at the Commission’s last meeting is that that extra-territorial jurisdiction creates a situation where one political subdivision imposes its ordinances on property that is not within its boundaries but is within the boundaries of another jurisdiction. This results in Salt Lake County Residents visiting unincorporated Salt Lake County but being subject to an ordinance written by Salt Lake City or Sandy.

In your letter you used the example of someone being ticketed when they enter Sandy City, and having to pay for a violation of city ordinance even if they did not vote for those who wrote the ordinance that they violated. You implied that this somehow refuted the argument I was making about representative government. You are wrong.

I agree with you. It is perfectly appropriate for Sandy to enforce its laws on those who visit the city. The residents of Sandy elected the city council, and council adopted the ordinance.

Visitors must abide by the law. But, these two examples are inherently different. The Cottonwood Canyons are not within the geographic boundaries of Salt Lake City, or Sandy.

They are in unincorporated Salt Lake County. In any other part of unincorporated Salt Lake County, the governing ordinance would be written by the Salt Lake County Council. Every resident of the county elects members to that council, and can petition the council if they do not like an ordiance or how it is enforced.

The ordinances that Salt Lake City and Sandy passed only apply in these canyons because they have been given extra-territorial jurisdiction–by definition, if something is extra-territorial, it is outside of the territory of the the entity that possesses such authority. I have no problem at all with Salt Lake City writing and enforcing whatever ordinance it wants in City Creek Canyon. City Creek is within its boundaries.

But, rather than the example you cited of a person going into Sandy being subject to Sandy laws, in these canyons, we have a situation where visitors to unincorporated Salt Lake County are subject to ordinances passed by a legislative body from a municipality that does not include this property within its geographic boundaries.

In many cases, the visitor, or landowner, is a resident of Salt Lake County, and does have a vote for the county council, but they are not being cited for violating a county ordinance–that would be a real apples to apples comparison–rather, they are being cited for violating an ordinance written by the Salt Lake City Council, or the Sandy City Council, by legislators they do not elect acting outside the geographical boundaries of their cities.

It is not only landowners who are subject to this jurisdiction, it is every one of the millions of visitors to the canyons who does not live in Salt Lake City, or Sandy, who is subject to this jurisdiction, and everyone of them is potentially subject to being fined, or arrested for violating an ordinance that they have no way to influence, despite being residents of the county and thus living within the jurisdiction that includes this property.

This is true not because they visited a jurisdiction where they do not live–your example. In fact, most are residents of Salt Lake County. But rather because a city has been given the right to execise its authority outside of its boundaries.

Oranges are not apples. It is not unreasonable to review this authority and its impact on watersheds, recreation, development and any other activity in the canyons. A committment to representative government at least goes that far.

” The Quality Growth Commission’s next meeting will be held on Friday, August 26, 2016 at 10:30 AM in the Aspen Room in the Senate East Office Building on Capitol Hill. The meeting is open to the public. The Utah Quality Growth Commission will hold its next meeting on Friday, August 26, 2016 at 10:30 AM in the Aspen Room in the Senate East Office Building on Capitol Hill in Salt Lake City.

The Commission will continue its discussion regarding watershed regulation and preservation in the Wasatch Mountains. An agenda for the meeting is attached here qgcagenda082616 Utah Quality Growth Commission Utah Quality Growth Commission Design a site like this with WordPress. com