Brice Wallace
The Utah Inland Port Authority was created in 2018, but the past couple of years have seen a whirlwind of changes. While the organization’s board has been reorganized, policies have been added or adjusted, and a new executive director and other staffers have been brought on board, the most prominent move has been spreading out.
As recently as early 2023, the port system consisted of one area, the Northwest Quadrant of Salt Lake City, a 16,000-acre site near the Salt Lake City International Airport. Now there are a dozen project areas, mostly near Utah’s north-south Interstate 15 spine.
The near future might hold a couple of more additions, but the authority remains in its relative infancy of creating a network of port project areas aimed at ultimately growing the economy throughout the state and creating a smoother, more efficient and less expensive way to move goods in and out of Utah.
Ben Hart, the authority’s executive director, recently acknowledged that there have been “some pivots and ebbs and flows along the way.”
“But right now, with what we’re doing, we’ve got the project areas across the state, we see good things happening in all of those project areas,” he said at a breakout session of the Manufacturing Conference, presented by the Utah Manufacturers Association. “We see good coordination, people working together. We’re also seeing really good logistic projects. We hope for you as shippers that what you see from the port’s efforts is that your rates get lower and lower. We still have some really high [shipping] rates here in the state of Utah.”
Among the organization’s goals are to work with local communities to boost their economies, including through the use of tax increment financing, which uses a portion of property taxes to reinvest to help stir economic growth. It also is working to build a logistics infrastructure to better move companies’ products into and out of Utah and into the global marketplace, primarily by improving their access to the rail network.
“The first goal we have as an organization is to take trucks off the road,” Hart said. He described trucks as the most “air quality-negative mode of transportation,” and both traffic congestion and air quality issues could improve if more goods were switched to rail.
“We have a great rail network here in the state of Utah. It’s total underutilized,” he said. “We’re putting everything on trucks while there’s a lot of opportunity to put more on rail.”
Use of rail could create efficiencies as Utah manufacturers and other companies “get our commodities and goods out to the global marketplace through our coastal ports” in Long Beach and Los Angeles, he said.
Looking beyond just truck and rail, the authority also wants to tap into the underutilized air cargo space, not just at the Salt Lake airport but also those throughout the state. “We only use about 6 percent of our cargo capacity on planes that are leaving the market, which is just insane to me,” Hart said.
The current setup features “really high costs” for shippers, and more air options could bring those costs down, he said. “We see this air cargo as a really, really key opportunity. … Interestingly enough, we’re seeing more and more reliance on air cargo, and it seems like the trajectory is only headed up. We feel like this is a really key vertical for our organization.”
As for economic development, the Northwest Quadrant remains a centerpiece of possibilities. Jerry Stevenson, a UIPA board member and state senator, is among the people who have warned that without guidance, the area could become “a massive warehouse district,” with lots of buildings but relatively few new jobs.
At the “Crossroads of the West,” the Northwest Quadrant “really is optimized and ready for significant development,” Hart said. “We really want to target this area towards more manufacture-related growth.
“As we’re looking to optimize the economic side of this, this is the sweet spot that I think those who created the inland port really wanted to see, was that nexus between rail and manufacturing … really helping that go vertical.”
Steel company BZI wanted better rail access at the Iron Springs project area and now has its input steel “brought to their front door,” Hart said. It’s an example of how the right type of public financing can lead to a company hiring more employees and accessing more efficient transportation in and out of an area, he said.
“We feel like these types of projects are exactly what we’re trying to accomplish at the port: harnessing the power of infrastructure to really help build regional economies,” he said. “We see this, we see the Northwest Quadrant, these are areas of pure economic strength. They’re places where we have good economic multipliers that can really ripple throughout the entire community.”
The creation of project areas has also helped Garland capture a 1 million-square-foot project involving Lakeshore Learning and the Northwest Quadrant land a Northrop Grumman expansion project.
The port authority has stressed that it is not controlling the type of economic development that will occur in project areas but instead is collaborating with local communities to help them grow their economies in the way they want. Local government officials, meanwhile, have expressed gratitude and hope that expected job creation in those project areas will lead to young people there remaining in their home areas, if they so choose, because they will have more job opportunities there in the future.
The expansion in the number of project areas accelerated starting in the spring of 2023 with its first area in a rural part of the state. By year-end, the state had eight project areas. The number currently stands at 12. Hart has said perhaps two more will be added in the coming months.
“We feel like 12 project areas is a pretty good mass for us,” he said at a recent authority board meeting. “We’re probably not going to be creating six or seven project areas every year like we have in the past,” Hart said, predicting that two to three per year is more likely going forward and added that “where they make sense, we’ll continue to move forward.”
Current project areas are the Northwest Quadrant in Salt Lake County; the Iron Springs Inland Port near Cedar City; the Verk Industrial Park Project Area in Spanish Fork; the Golden Spike Project Area in Box Elder County; the Central Utah Agri-Park in Juab County; the Mineral Mountains Project Area in Beaver County; the Historic Capitol Project Area in Millard County; the Tooele Valley Project Area and Twenty Wells Project Area, both in Tooele County; the West Weber Project Area in Weber County; the Castle Country Project Area in Carbon and Emery counties; and the Skyline Corridor Project Area in parts of Sanpete, Sevier and Wayne counties.
But geographic growth is not the only port authority constant. So too has been criticism, primarily from people expressing concerns about project area development potentially harming the environment, including the Great Salt Lake.
Hart said the authority has gone to great lengths to protect the environment in the project areas.
“There is a reality that a lot of the rail that historically has been built here in the state of Utah, they just pushed it up against the lake. I think a lot of people thought, ‘Oh, we’re never going to use that. It’s not important. We’re just going to push it to the lake.’ So, we find now that as we work around rail across the state, we do end up in a lot of places where there are sensitive land areas,” he said.
“The concept around development is usually going to be just a little bit controversial, especially in a fast-growing state like Utah.”