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BANKING
• Bank of Utah, Ogden, has appointed Nick Thompson as branch manager of its 711 S. State St., Salt Lake City, location. Thompson has nearly four years of banking experience. He has worked for Wells Fargo and Zions Bank, managing new accounts, consumer and commercial lending, and working in branch management. Thompson has a bachelor’s degree in finance from Weber State University. Thompson replaces Mary Ryan, branch manager/assistant vice president, who retired in December after working for Bank of Utah for more than 40 years. She began her career at Bank of Utah’s Washington Terrace location in Ogden and advanced from teller to several other positions, including head teller, operations manager/AVP, regional branch manager/AVP and branch manager/AVP. She began serving as operations manager/AVP for the 7th South branch in 1997 and became branch manager/AVP in 2014.
CORPORATE
• Extra Space Storage Inc., Salt Lake City, has amended and restated its senior unsecured credit facility, increasing the total capacity to $200 million to a total of $1.35 billion. The credit facility consists of a $650 million senior unsecured revolving credit facility due January 2023, a $480 million senior unsecured term loan due January 2024, and a $220 million senior unsecured term loan due October 2023. The credit agreement provides the company an option to increase capacity by an additional $650 million for a total of $2 billion. Extra Space Storage is a real estate investment trust that owns and/or operates 1,606 self-storage properties in 39 states; Washington, D.C.; and Puerto Rico.
DIVIDENDS
• American Silver LLC, parent company of Alpine-based American Biotech Labs LLC, has declared a distribution of 33 cents per share, providing about $500,000 to American Fork-based Clifton Mining Co., its largest shareholder. With a 10-cent-per-share distribution earlier this year, Clifton said it has received distributions totaling about $655,000 for 2018.
ECONOMIC INDICATORS
• Park City is ranked fourth among the top 10 “Hottest Places in America to Buy a Winter Vacation Home,” a ranking compiled by Vacasa Vacation Report, a vacation rental property management company. Vacasa looked at U.S. vacation rental markets with the highest average occupancy by month from November to January and then ordered its list by the rate of one-year return on investment to help determine the top 10. Park City saw a 5.1 percent one-year return and had a median home price of $447,000. The top spot was Okemo/Ludlow, Vermont, at 6.1 percent and a median home price of $273,000. Others on the list were Mount Hood, Oregon; Leavenworth, Washington; Park City; Steamboat Springs, Colorado; Big Bear Lake, California; Pagosa Springs, Colorado, Flagstaff, Arizona; Stowe, Vermont; and North Lake Tahoe, Nevada. The report is available at https://www.vacasa.com/real-estate/buyer/top-winter-destinations-to-buy-vacation-home.
EDUCATION
• Weber State University will host a grand opening ceremony Jan. 7 at 2:30 p.m. for the renovated Lindquist Hall, formerly known as the Social Science Building. Jan. 7 is also Weber State’s 130th Founders Day. An open house with self-guided tours of the building will be held from 2-4 p.m., with the formal ribbon-cutting ceremony at 2:30 p.m. WSU alumnus Paul Draper, an anthropology graduate and illusionist, is scheduled to perform at 3 and 4 p.m. Lindquist Hall has been named in honor of the Lindquist family. John E. Lindquist, president of Lindquist Mortuaries and Great Western Insurance, donated $5 million to the project. Additional funding for the building came from the Utah State Legislature. The Legislature approved $14 million for construction in 2017, and an additional $16 million was allocated in 2018 to complete the project. The $34.9 million renovation began in April 2017. The four-story Lindquist Hall will house the offices of seven departments: criminal justice, geography, history, political science and philosophy, psychology, social work and gerontology, and sociology and anthropology. Additionally, the Olene S. Walker Institute of Politics & Public Service and the Richard Richards Institute for Ethics will be located in the new building. The 119,322-square-foot building was designed by GSBS Architects and built by Big-D Construction. The building will have 34 classrooms, 72 offices, five labs, a 150-seat lecture hall, a computer lab and testing center, and study spaces on each floor.
FURNITURE
• KI, based in Wisconsin, has named Julie Wissler as distribution agency for its Utah territory. She will work to provide dealers, architects, designers and end-users throughout the state with KI’s furniture solutions. She will market and distribute KI products through her firm, Interior Products Group, a wholesale distributor. Wissler has more than 20 years of experience in the contract furniture industry. She previously was principal and area sales manager with The Skinner Group, a manufacturers’ representative group based in Denver. She has also held marketing and sales positions with Kimball, Knoll and Henriksen Butler.
HEALTHCARE
• PolarityTE Inc., a Salt Lake City-based commercial-stage biotechnology company, has announced the addition of Minnie Baylor-Henry to the company’s board of directors. Baylor-Henry is a regulatory affairs leader who served for nearly a decade at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) before spending most of her career at Johnson & Johnson, where she served in multiple roles, most recently as worldwide vice president of regulatory affairs. While at the FDA, she served as regulatory review officer; director/branch chief at the Division of Drug Marketing, Advertising and Communications; and national health fraud coordinator at the FDA Office of Regulatory Affairs. She also was the national director for regulatory, risk and compliance for the life science division at Deloitte. She currently operates her own consulting firm, providing strategic regulatory affairs advice to pharmaceutical, biopharmaceutical and medical device companies.
MANUFACTURING
• Varex Imaging Corp., Salt Lake City, has announced it will have its annual stockholders meeting on Feb. 14 at 4:30 p.m. at the company’s headquarters, 1678 S. Pioneer Road. Varex is an innovator, designer and manufacturer of X-ray imaging components, which include X-ray tubes, digital detectors and other image processing solutions that are key components of X-ray imaging systems.
NONPROFITS
• Utah Foundation has announced several new officers. The chair is Elizabeth Hitch, associate commissioner for academic affairs in the Utah System of Higher Education. She previously served as vice chair and replaces outgoing chair Brent Jensen, vice president of HDR Engineering. The new vice chair is Chad Westover, CEO of University of Utah Health Plans. The new treasurer is R. Dan Eldredge, general manager of Intermountain Power Agency. He replaces Peter Mann, audit managing director at Deloitte & Touche. Also, the foundation announced that Annalisa Holcombe, vice president and chief advancement officer at Westminster College, will take over as fundraising chair. She replaces Mark Buchi, partner at Holland & Hart.
OUTDOOR PRODUCTS/RECREATION/SPORTS
• POWDR, a Park City-based adventure lifestyle company, has announced its acquisition of Powderbird and a new partnership with Cloudveil Mountain Skiing. Powderbird will offer helicopter-accessed skiing to 150,000 acres in the Uinta and Wasatch mountain ranges, starting in the current ski season, as well as the opportunity to enjoy custom international destination packages and access to boutique, remote lodging in Utah. Powderbird has offered backcountry heli-skiing in Utah since 1973. It will continue to be based out of Snowbird resort and will continue to operate out of Heber, West Bountiful Skypark and Snowbird. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
• Vail Resorts Inc. has announced plans to transform Tombstone BBQ at Park City Mountain as part of an approximately $175 million to $180 million investment in the guest experience in time for the 2019-20 ski and ride season across its resorts. The Tombstone BBQ will become permanent. It will include seating for up to 50 people, indoor restrooms, a beer bar and a full kitchen to allow for the use of reusable serve ware.
PHILANTHROPY
• The Huntsman Foundation has donated $1 million to The Road Home to support the charity’s Holiday Mediathon, which took place Dec. 20-21. Every dollar donated by the public during the event was matched by the Huntsman Foundation. The Holiday Mediathon is the largest fundraiser for the nonprofit organization that provides emergency shelter, permanent supportive housing and support services to help Utahns overcome homelessness. Since 1992, the Jon M. Huntsman family has donated more than $5.2 million for operations and support of The Road Home’s shelter and housing programs.
REAL ESTATE
• Fairstone at Riverview and Alpine Meadows have been sold by Acacia Capital to Kennedy Wilson for an undisclosed amount. Built in 1997, Fairstone at Riverview, in Taylorsville, contains 492 units on more than 28 acres. The two-story Alpine Meadows, built in 1996 and located in Sandy, has 222 units. Eli Mills and Patrick Bodnar of CBRE represented Acacia Capital in the transaction.
RECOGNITIONS
• Merit Medical Ireland, a subsidiary of Merit Medical Systems Inc., South Jordan, recently won the Medtech Company of the Year Award 2018, granted by a panel consisting of Irish business enterprise and governmental agency leaders. Merit Medical Ireland began operations in Castlerea, Co Roscommon, Ireland in 1993 with 22 employees manufacturing single-use inflation and hemostasis devices. Today, Merit’s European operations are headquartered in Galway City, Ireland, with approximately 1,000 employees. Merit now has two state-of-the-art facilities in Galway and supports operations and research and development activities for Merit’s additional European facilities. Merit’s European operations contributed approximately 33 percent to Merit’s corporate revenues in 2017.
• Eight Utah companies recently earned Best in Biz Awards, a business awards program judged each year by prominent editors and reporters from top-tier publications in North America. Vivint Solar earned silver for Marketing Department of the Year, Sales Department of the Year and Sales Executive of the Year (Chance Allred, chief sales officer). USANA earned silver for Product Line of the Year — Consumer (Celavive skincare system) and bronze for Company of the Year — Large (1,000 or more employees). O.C. Tanner earned gold for Most Customer Friendly Company of the Year — Large (more than 1,000) employees and HR Executive of the Year (Mindi Cox, senior vice president of people and great work). InMoment received gold for Marketing Executive of the Year (Kristi Knight, chief marketing officer). Purple received gold for Best New Version of the Year — Consumer (Responsive Support Coil mattresses). Pluralsight earned silver for Best New Product of the Year — Enterprise (Role IQ). Podium earned bronze for Small or Medium Business Service of the Year (Podium online review platform). Domo earned gold for Enterprise Product of the Year — All Other Software. The eighth annual Best in Biz Awards program evaluated and scored nearly 700 entries from public and private companies of all sizes and from a variety of geographic regions and industries in the U.S. and Canada.
• Four Utah ski resorts are on a list of the “Top 25 U.S. Ski Resorts,” compiled by TurnKey Vacation Rentals. They are No. 3 Snowbird, No. 4 Park City Mountain Resort, No. 6 Powder Mountain Resort and No. 23 Alta Ski Area. Turnkey collected information from Google Search data on 260 ski resorts in the U.S., focusing specifically on resorts with over 15 trails. The criteria included average ticket price, total number of trails and lifts, vertical drop, length of season, average snowfall, and overall search volume for each resort. Also on the list were No. 34 Snowbasin, No. 44 Solitude Mountain Resort, No. 48 Deer Valley, No. 52 Brian Head Ski Resort, No. 60 Brighton, No. 88 Beaver Mountain, No. 91 Eagle Point Resort and No. 103 Sundance Mountain Resort. Utah was second among states for most expensive lift ticket prices, at $89.71, up $1 from a year ago. Utah was behind only Colorado, at $111.86. The national average was $68.11. The most affordable ticket was in Minnesota, at $55.52.
RURAL UTAH
• Two companies were endorsed for Rural Fast Track grants at the December meeting of the Governor’s Office of Economic Development (GOED) board. Andy Cox Electrical, of Manti in Sanpete County, was endorsed for a grant of $27,500 to help the company purchase a new piece of equipment for concrete lifting and concrete repair. The $55,000 project is expected to allow the company, currently with four employees, to add one new full-time position. Everwood Inc., of Honeyville in Box Elder County, was endorsed for a $50,000 grant to help it purchase finishing equipment for cabinet-making. The company currently has four employees, but the $115,000 project is expected to result in one new full-time position. The grants were previously approved by the Governor’s Rural Partnership Board.
SOFTWARE
• Canopy, a Lehi-based tax and accounting software company, has hired Camille Lewis as director of people operations. Lewis’ experience includes working in a variety of industries, including logistics, employee advocacy and technology, most recently serving as manager of recruiting at O.C. Tanner. She also has served in various HR positions at Apex Logistics Group and Qualtrics. Lewis earned a Bachelor of Arts degree focused in English language and literature/letters from Brigham Young University.
SENIOR LIVING
• Summit Vista, a Taylorsville-based active senior living community, has promoted Marcus Cordova to associate executive director, where he will advise operational departments. He will have responsibility for the departments in general services, which include maintenance, facilities, housekeeping, security, transportation and reception. He will retain his director of culinary arts position. Cordova has more than 25 years of experience in the food industry and 10 years of experience in senior housing. He opened a restaurant in Monte Vista, Colorado, and before joining Summit Vista in 2017, he was owner and chef of chef de cuisine at a Denver-area country club, the executive chef and general manager of a specialty food market, and the food and beverage director and executive chef for a large retirement community.
SERVICES
• VPTax Inc., a San Francisco-based tax firm, has hired Adam Beasley as tax director in its Salt Lake City office. He will focus on helping the firm expand its footprint in the Salt Lake City market. Beasley has more than 20 years of professional experience. He previously was a senior tax manager and director of tax at Ernst & Young, KPMG, Sorenson Communications and Assure Services. He graduated from the University of Utah David Eccles School of Business with a bachelor’s degree in accounting and a master’s degree in professional accountancy.