435 Podcast: Southern Utah
Explore the heartbeat of Southern Utah with the 435 Podcast, your go-to source for all things local in Washington County. Stay ahead of the curve with our in-depth coverage, expert analysis, and captivating interviews. Whether you're a resident or visitor, our podcast is your key to unlocking the latest happenings and trends in St. George and the surrounding areas. Tune in now to stay informed and connected with our thriving community!
435 Podcast: Southern Utah
The Impact of Trust Lands on Southern Utah's Future
Discover the profound influence of early American visionaries like Thomas Jefferson and Elbridge Gerry, who laid the groundwork for America's westward expansion and the vital role of trust lands. This episode promises insights into the Northern Corridor project in Southern Utah, tracing the roots of the School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration. We explore how a historical vision has evolved into a sustainable framework that benefits public education and institutions today.
Join us as we highlight Utah's transformative journey in trust lands management, contrasting it with neighboring states like Arizona and New Mexico. Hear how Utah overcame financial challenges in the 1980s by establishing SITLA in 1994, a pivotal move toward responsible land stewardship. We unravel the governance structure that supports strategic, business-like operations insulated from political pressures, ensuring that trust lands continue to serve their beneficiaries effectively. Kyle Pasley provides an insider’s perspective on the innovative strategies that have turned Utah's trust lands into a model of fiduciary excellence and sustainability.
Guest: Kyle Pasley. Managing Director, Real Estate, SITLA
LinkedIn Webpage: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kyle-pasley-5774949/
Eric Clarke Episode - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kz6hgYTbEtE&t=17s
Holly Snow Canada Episode - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sZkUWxNZfk&t=1692s
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#TrustLands #UtahHistory #SITLA #landmanagement #Education #southernutah #southernutah #stgeorgeutah #435podcast
[00:00:00] Intro.
[00:12:35] Utah's Trust Lands Management Transformation.
[00:24:12] Utah's Trust Lands Management and Funding.
Hey everybody, welcome back to the 435 podcast. I'm your host, robert McFarland, and today we continue our conversation about the Northern Corridor controversy. If you haven't seen the episodes before, we have the two previous episodes we've done in the links below in the description. Today we're sitting down with the Managing Director of Real Estate, kyle Paisley, of the School and Institutional Trustlands Administration, also known as CITLA or the Utah Trustlands. We figure out where is their role in this whole controversy and exploring the history of SITLA so you can understand more about that. It's a two-part series where we go through the history and in a second we talk about their role in the Northern Corridor and affordable housing here in Southern Utah. We hope you enjoy these episodes. Guys. Have a Merry Christmas. We'll see you out there. From the Blue Form Media Studios this is the 435 Podcast, the pulse of Southern Utah, kyle.
Speaker 1:Thanks for coming on the show. You bet Happy to be here. This is a perfect part three episode of this Northern Corridor conversation and I think what oftentimes gets overlooked is the Utah Trust lands involvement in why the corridor is important, because there's the county aspect, there's the traffic aspect, there's the conservation aspect, but there's a mandate that you're required to execute and I'd like for you to kind of take me back. What, what the forming of the school and institutional trust lands administration, uh, sitla, as as most people uh have heard of it if anybody has heard of it, cause a lot of people don't know about it. Um, maybe take me back through the, the history of it, the formation and and what your mandate is. You know through the state constitution, because it goes all the way back to that as to what your job is. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So I'm going to turn this into a history podcast. I like it For just a minute, so I'm going to take you a lot farther back than SITLA. I'm going to just take you back to the formation of trust lands as a concept, and that formation actually goes back to the beginning of the Constitutional Republic of the United States. So that goes all the way back to the time when the country was vying to move from the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution. There were a group of founding fathers that got together that said that if we're going to do that, we're going to move. Then we need to move the ideals of the country forward and we need to grow the country. We need to have a systematic and good way to do that and we need to have a way to perpetuate the values as we grow in an orderly and peaceful way. So at the same time that the Constitutional Convention is taking place, thomas Jefferson and Elbridge Gerry, who's one of the original signers of the Constitution, along with some input from James Madison and others, get together with the Congress and they say we need to start passing laws that will enable us to grow the country to the West peacefully and in an organized way. There were these vast territories out of the West from the colonies that most of the colonies tried to lay claim to and they knew if they were going to grow that was going to be a problem. So they needed to make sure that the colonies gave up those territories and then, as the country grew to the West, that they had a systematic way to grow it.
Speaker 2:So there's two pieces of legislation that are very key in 1785 and 1787 to trust lands, and they tie to the ideals of the Constitutional Republic, as John Adams called it, where they talked about people being tied to education and the land being vitally important for the survival of the republic. And so they looked at this and thought, well, how can we do this? So the General Land Ordinance of 1785 is the first piece passed. That piece of legislation has the states give up their claim to the territories to the west the original colonies and forms a survey system, a systematic scientific survey system that they will survey the entire country on, and the entire country will do. And they form this and George Washington has some input on this as well, if you look through the historical record as a surveyor and they look and they say we're going to scientifically survey the country in a grid system and we're going to do it in 36 square mile grids. It's called townships and ranges, right, and anybody who's familiar with land knows that that's the way we measure things. And then we're going to take those townships and ranges and we're going to make one square mile parcels within those called sections and the entire country is going to be surveyed on this, rather than the old meets and bounds system that relied on trees and rocks and rivers and things that could change and just created conflict.
Speaker 2:So that took some of the conflict out of the growing of the country. So that was vitally important. Number one was to make it peaceful. I mean, modern human history is filled with violence over land, right. I mean people will say religion and ideologies are the drivers of war. Mostly it's land, with religion and ideology being the front right for that.
Speaker 1:Well, and then they're still trying to figure out how to divvy up land from all of these, this aristocracy and this, this lordship and the barons and the royalty, and how, how all this land has been locked up for so long that it's, uh, hindering their ability to continue to grow. And this is, you know, hundreds of years later, which is just really interesting that they, man. I always go back to the foresight that the founding fathers and the original framers of the country, they really were looking really long, long term and down the road was pretty, pretty interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely yeah. So they, they look at this and so it's really important. Public and private ownership of land was vitally important to the founding fathers for two reasons. I mean one, so there's no land disputes. People can buy and sell land, which was vitally important for the economic development and viability of the republic moving forward. Number two, the public ownership, because now the federal government would own all the land. As states were admitted into the union, they would now use this survey system to sell federal land to fund the new constitutional republic, and that is the way that the country made its money until the eve of World War I, when the income tax is enacted in 1916. Wow, so that's-.
Speaker 1:Correct me if I'm wrong.
Speaker 3:Yeah, correct me if I'm wrong, but the idea of private land ownership didn't really exist until then in the world.
Speaker 2:Not particularly so. Henry VIII had some private land ownership that's the genesis of it when he broke off from the Catholic Church and needed to find a way to divvy up church assets in England, to find a way to divvy up church assets in England. So that was kind of the beginning of private ownership, using the air quotes here, because it went to the royalty like we were talking about in England, right, and so that's where they're still running into those problems today. But that was kind of the genesis and that's where you see, landed gentry and the middle class start to form is basically in England after the split from the Catholic church. Oh, got it so. But the idea of private ownership as we know it today is a very much an American institution and founded by the founding fathers.
Speaker 3:I mean, one thing we talk about in real estate is like the, the, the kind of the keystone, I guess you could say, of the American dream is owning your own piece of property.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, john Locke. I mean, when you go back to like the political ideologies of the time, is life, liberty and it wasn't the pursuit of happiness. To start with John Locke, he says life, liberty and property property, life liberty and property Right and so like this this goes back to that kind of original thought is that the land is your livelihood, it's what keeps you alive, right? The resources, especially the agrarian society, and the economy at the time was cattle and minerals and wood and farming. So anyway, keep rolling.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So we go back to that.
Speaker 2:So they pass this legislation and then the next piece of legislation is the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. That piece of legislation is the legislation that lines out how states are admitted to the union and what's important for that, and that really is followed pretty much all the way through Hawaii and Alaska. So the concepts are pretty much exactly the same as they were in 1787, with a few tweaks. But in that piece of legislation again, thomas Jefferson particularly felt it very important that people were tied to the land and they were tied to education. They felt that was vitally important. So Thomas Jefferson thought public education was important. Public education was important.
Speaker 2:Now he had a slightly different view than someone like John Adams, coming out of the Congregationalist New England, had, which is a little closer to what we see today in public education, but he felt it vitally important. So he took this survey system and said all right, so what we're going to do when we admit states into the union, we're going to take one section out of every township section 16, and that's going to be set aside for the benefit of public education and so every state that comes in. And in this legislation I don't have the legislation right in front of me, but, to paraphrase, it basically says that religion, morality and education being vitally important to the survival of the country, we will provide these lands for this purpose. So these were provided for this purpose. Now, thomas Jefferson had this viewpoint that these townships were going to be their own communities and that the school would be at the center and the school would be located on section 16 and the educators would live there and earn their living off that land. And, of course, development doesn't happen that smoothly.
Speaker 1:I think it's funny. He picked 16. What made him pick it? That's such a random. It's not even in the middle, Isn't there 36 sections? Yeah, there's 36 sections.
Speaker 2:It's as close to the middle as you can get 15 or 16. So 16 was what it was. It's a little offset from the center. So he picked that no-transcript A section, granted it at statehood and they start adding shortly thereafter extra acreage for other institutions, public institutions, land grant, colleges and other public institutions that states find important at statehood. So starting with Michigan in 1837, they finally get to the point where they say, look, this isn't happening, where the schools are going on 16. The schools are going on 16. So we're going to morph that a little bit so that these lands are actually held in trust and the money from these lands will be used to support common schools, they call them, or public education.
Speaker 2:So that kind of morphs, starting with Michigan in 1837. As we march west, just we'll skip through some history. We get to the Midwest, the land becomes more arid, so they start doing two sections per township at statehood and by the time they get out to the really arid West so Utah, arizona and New Mexico four townships per section are granted at statehood for the benefit of public education and then several hundreds of thousands of acres granted for public institutions Got it. So I think it's vitally important that people understand that the concept of trust lands the founding fathers literally with the grid system, and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 set the literal building blocks for the country. That is how economic development and the country moved forward and that was the genesis of Trustlands and as I work for Trustlands, I consider that kind of a sacred trust that's been handed on all the way from the Constitutional Republic to now.
Speaker 1:I think a lot of people, even me. It's funny because you brought it back to the federal government and it wasn't until yesterday in additional research and I've, I've, I felt like I've done enough in my my research to understand at a whole. But as soon as I realized that it's coming from the federal government, this allotment of these sections were bound to this statehood, is it? It's? It's not a state thing, it's, it's a federal government thing. It's a, it's a, it's a national, it's a, it's a, it's a national thing that that really is instituted everywhere else. So how is Utah different? I mean, I guess in the operation is it? Is it the same in Utah as it is Arizona and New Mexico?
Speaker 2:No, each state has a vastly different way that they manage their trust lands. There's about 22 states left with trust lands in the country country. The rest of them have all been sold off long ago or disposed of in different ways and there's been a lot of federal case law that has come along that's kind of strengthened the trust mandates for the properties as they've moved west and so forth. Each is different. So with Utah, utah is a different animal. So Utah became a state in 1896. And when we became a state and our Enabling Act granted trust lands, 6 million acres were granted for public education in this scatter section. You know 2, 16, 32, and 36 are the four sections that were given, and then over 500,000 acres to public institutions that they got to just take from the federal registry. Part of that was Utah State and the University of Utah, their land-grant institutions.
Speaker 1:So those campuses— Utah State being an agricultural—.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:They're the Aggies, right, Right they're the Aggies.
Speaker 2:So if you go to most states, anything that's an Aggie Colorado State, texas, a&m, others those are land grant institutions. Those were instituted in the Michigan Land Grant Act. So Michigan State University is the first of those that you see in the country. But there's other lands that we manage for that beneficiary as well that they still take out. Now in Utah.
Speaker 2:Utah had been settled for 50 years by the time it became a state. So there were lots of homesteads, mining, railroad grants that sat on those sections. The most famous is the Salt Lake Temple is sitting on a would-be school section, right. So I mean, obviously that didn't go to the schools at statehood. So instead they got what we call an in lieu of selection. So common schools got to go and select other properties so that they got their acreage that they should have gotten right. So just why? You see that's not the whole reason. You see blocks. Some of those are from exchanges with the federal government as national parks and national forests have been created and we've gotten our sections out and consolidated them. But that's kind of where you see at the genesis. So that starts in 1896.
Speaker 2:Now the way Utah manages, here's the story. With that Utah has a very different way that we manage trust lands than most other states. They're under all the same trust obligations that other states have that have been tried out in federal trust law. So we carry all those same obligations. But what happened was from 1896 to the 1980s.
Speaker 2:We disposed of about three and a half million acres of land in that time and had $50 million in the permanent fund to show for it. So if you look at a map of the state of Utah, wow, in the state of Utah was once Trustlands. So Trustlands is a major driver for economic development in this state that people don't know about. But a lot of it was given away or, you know, frittered away very early by the 1920s. Most of the Wasatch Front property was gone by the 1980s. You start to see that there's a graduate student at the University of Utah that starts studying this. The Education Association starts looking into this and others and the University of Utah and says you know something's wrong with the model here, like we should have a lot more money to show for this. Our neighboring states New Mexico and Arizona have a lot more money, why do we not?
Speaker 1:So they start looking into that, and they don't even have as many resources as Utah does I mean, if you? Look at from north to south. Utah is resource rich so you'd think, especially over that time frame, they should have been making a lot more money for that.
Speaker 2:New Mexico has a lot of oil and gas. Well, I guess that's true Kind of out in the Permian Basin. That neighbors.
Speaker 2:Texas. But you're right, I mean a lot of resources that weren't. You know, royalties weren't getting paid, land was getting given away. You know we weren't following the fiduciary responsibility that we had. So this is in the 80s. This is in the 80s, so lawsuits are threatened.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of history there that I won't go through. But what the legislature does, is they form kind of this blue ribbon commission to look at trust lands? Legislature does, is they form kind of this blue ribbon commission to look at trust lands? And to this point, from 1896 on, we are managed by the state land board and its predecessors and its successors. Uh, what would be dnr today? Right? Uh, which is interesting because other state land does not have the same mandate that trust lands does. Other state land has a mandate as open multi-use land, much like the BLM, and Trustlands has a very strict fiduciary responsibility. So there's already an inherent conflict there if you're trying to manage them both right under the same roof. So they do this analysis and they come back, they get some advisory opinions from the Utah Supreme Court and they spin SITLA, the Trust Lands Administration, off of state lands and form our own agency in 1994.
Speaker 2:So in 1994, we become our own agency and we take all the trust lands with us and we're put under strict fiduciary obligation to manage that land for the benefit of the beneficiaries. So the state Supreme Court does an advisory opinion. That's written right into the statute that formed us. That says that the beneficiaries for trust lands are not the public at large or other municipal corporations or other governmental entities. So it's very strict in the way it's interpreted and that's borne out in federal trust law and cases that have been tried through the federal Supreme Courts. So we've been given a very strict mandate that we are to make money for our beneficiaries and that land is held for that exact purpose, for that exact purpose. So what's happened with that then? Since 1994 to today the permanent fund has grown from just little under $50 million to $3.7 billion we're verging on $4 billion by prudent management of lands, making sure that we're doing what we do Now.
Speaker 2:We manage lands. We make money lots of different ways. We have lands scattered throughout the state. We have our energy and minerals group. They're a large revenue generator for us with oil and gas and hard rock minerals and aggregate minerals. We have our surface resources group that does grazing and agriculture, they do filming permits. When Thelma and Louise went off the cliff, that was done on Trustlands, oh wow. So just as a gee whiz and some other movies that bombed at the box office.
Speaker 1:For all those boomer generation listening in, they'll recognize that, yeah, they'll understand that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, if you're Gen Z or one other, go ahead and Google that.
Speaker 2:Watch Thelma Belize go off the cliff. So that's one. And then there's real estate development, which is the group that I head, where we manage lands to develop real estate. It's that's important here in Washington County, because in Washington County is probably 80% of our development revenue comes from this County. Wow, now the reason for that going back to what I talked about before, that most of the land on the Wasatch front was gone early, got it? So if I talk to my counterpart in Arizona, they make a lot of money off development, but most of their land is in the Phoenix and Tucson metro areas.
Speaker 1:And they hadn't just ditched that, they were able to hold on to that and gain real estate value out of that land as it boomed Right. That makes sense.
Speaker 2:Well, and the reason was is because people were living in the climate up north, but they didn't live here Because people were living in the climate up north, but they didn't live here.
Speaker 2:You know, things didn't change here until the late 1960s, when commercial air conditioning became viable in homes and I-15 went through and then, once you see that now you start to see an uptick in Washington County growing and then of course there's other reasons for booms from then on, but because of that our land ended up being insulated, so that's why we have so much land in this urban area.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so say that one more time. I don't know if I missed it. 80% of the total revenue comes from the county. Total revenue from the development group not for the agency, For the development group comes from Washington County Last several years about 40 to 50% of the revenue for the agency For the development group comes from Washington County.
Speaker 2:Last several years about 40% to 50% of the revenue for the agency comes from the development group. Now we do have development other places Iron County, western Utah County, tooele County, moab, san Juan County. There are other places we do development.
Speaker 3:This is just, we're very heavily concentrated here, but still, I mean you're talking 80% of 50% of the total revenue comes from this county. Yeah, I mean that's pretty significant, yeah, yeah it is.
Speaker 2:It is very significant and you know if you look around here. So Trustlands Projects that we're partnered in. So just to give you an idea, if you look at this county and I got a map up right here so we could pull it up.
Speaker 3:Yeah, like Desert Color might be an example.
Speaker 2:Yeah, desert Color Like desert color might be an example Desert color, yep. Fort Pierce industrial park, uh, part of uh the uh of desert canyons, just just to the uh, to the west, to the east of uh river road, oh right, and west of desert canyons, uh, coral Canyon, sun river, uh, sienna hills, green springs, little valley, uh, you know not, and some of these, not all of them, were trust lands, but a portion of them were uh. So I mean you, you look at that, I mean you're kanta dameron valley, uh, there are. We have holdings up in leeds, we have holdings out by the ledges, we have holdings winchester hills, we control 1500 acres around the airport, all that land north of SR7 going all the way to River Road.
Speaker 1:I mean Desert Hills.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Desert Hills High Schools used to be on trust lands.
Speaker 1:And, as I look at this, you talked about trading. So how are these? I mean, how did we get to the consolidation? How are these? I mean, how did we get to the consolidation? Because it seems to me like there was some effort being put into consolidating that land as close to I-15 as possible. When did that all start?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so that started in the 70s.
Speaker 1:Okay, because 71, I think, is when I-15 connected through the Virgin River Gorge.
Speaker 2:Right, there were some consultants that were hired as my understanding obviously this predates me, but there were some consultants hired that said, hey, washington County is going to be a viable place for real estate development in the future. You should start blocking up some lands. And so we did out of exchanges. And we look at that. When we do exchanges from the federal government, we're looking at ways that we can maximize revenue as we get out of land, out of national parks and national forests and other things, and we do these exchanges, we're looking at ways that we can maximize revenue. And that's where we differ from other states a little bit. So other states have they're under the same trust obligations, but they have very strict ways as the ways they can distribute or get rid of, dispose of property. Like Arizona can only auction their property. That's all they can do. Oh, interesting, so they can only do it by auction and that's in their constitution. So there's so they can't trade. Well, they can trade, but it's very difficult for them.
Speaker 1:Okay, got it.
Speaker 2:Very difficult for them. We have much more flexibility and when we were formed, we were tasked to operate as much like a business as possible, which is really what I think you know you hear a lot of people talk about. Hey, we want to see government work like a business. Well, that's great, until it interferes with what you want, right. But we try to operate as much like a business as we can. So our board of trustees is actually appointed by our beneficiaries to insulate us from the politics. So our board of trustees are actually people who are from the business world, who have expertise in the different things that we do Oil and gas, real estate development, land trades, water, renewable energy all sit on our board.
Speaker 1:So the board of trustees, though, is appointed by the governor and then confirmed by the Senate. I think there's seven sit on our board, and we do have-. The board of trustees, though, is appointed by the governor and then confirmed by the Senate.
Speaker 2:I think there's seven members on yeah there's seven members, but they're picked by our beneficiaries. Okay, those are picked. So the okay? Yeah, so they're not political appointees per se. They go through the process that a political appointee goes through, but they're not politically appointed. So it's not the legislature, the governor doesn't pick them.
Speaker 1:But they're not politically appointed, so it's not the legislature. The governor doesn't pick them, so who do they?
Speaker 2:pick. Who does the governor and legislature pick? Well, they don't. The governor has one appointment that sits on the board. His deputy chief of staff, mike Maurer, is our person that sits on the board now. Then the other six the beneficiaries have a nominating committee and they look for people in expertise from the business areas that we do and they rotate off one every. You know you do a six-year term and then every year one gets replaced.
Speaker 2:So this last year our chair, dave Donegan, was the president of Sinclair Oil. He rotated off. And John Baza, who used to be the director of the division of oil, gas and mining, came on, got it. The year before that, rick Woodbury was our real estate development expert. He ran Woodbury Development, which is one of the largest developers in the state, and he rotated off. And Dan Simons, who was a broker and a former economic development director of Sandy, and Blair H Miller, real estate director, came on, got it. And so they rotate off the beneficiaries, pick them and then they go through and the governor appoints them. Because that's, you know the way. You get appointed to a board in the city.
Speaker 1:So the beneficiaries. I'm sorry, I'm not very smart. Sometimes the beneficiaries are who?
Speaker 2:So the beneficiaries.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, so I haven't told you so that's okay, so we have 12 beneficiaries that we serve the vast majority of the land that we have 96% is public education, so common schools. That doesn't mean school districts they're their own entities but that means common schools like public education at large state office of education. And then we have 11 other beneficiaries. That's university of Utah, utah state university. Miners hospital, uh, the school of minds, uh, the school of the deaf, school of the blind, uh, the state uh, mental hospital. It used to be called the insane asylum. I you know they politically correctified that name. Uh, you've got normal schools, which are the education colleges of the state, uh, so they're one of the beneficiaries. State reservoirs, uh, state buildings state reservoirs meaning like water.
Speaker 1:Yes, like like somebody from the water districts yeah, like it.
Speaker 2:It's to help build, uh, reservoir projects. Most of that land is gone. A lot of it was used to actually build reservoirs early on in the state and then the state building fund. They're kind of out of land. We don't really manage any land for them. They had a very small holding to be. Who is that? I'm sorry. State buildings state buildings.
Speaker 2:So that some of that money went into the refurb of the capital back in the 1990s. Got it Okay, so, and there's one other beneficiary that I'm missing off, the top of my head that was pretty well done.
Speaker 1:That was a good list, okay. So then, each one of these beneficiaries has is nominated or selected to be one of the people in name of that institution, so there's somebody within that institution that's appointed, or?
Speaker 2:like an expert in that industry well, no, those beneficiaries get together and form a committee and then those beneficiaries go out and they solicit people to serve on the board from industry. Okay, got it right. Okay, but they pick it because it's their land got it right. It's their land Got it Right, it's their benefit Got it. So it's for the strict use of the beneficiaries.
Speaker 1:Okay, so then. So, as far as the history goes, I think we've caught up so far to where we're at today, right. The only thing I think missing out is in 2014, citfo, so there was the financial organization that manages basically the for lack of a better term the fund whether it's a hedge fund. It's the management of the money coming in, so that was established in 2014. What was the purpose of having a specific board of individuals? To manage just the money. It started getting big. I'm guessing yeah, it started getting big.
Speaker 2:The treasurer had always managed that before and so they decided they had a group of beneficiaries that decided they wanted to have their own fund manager that would spend the permanent funds off and then manage them much like SITLA does with the land, like a business. So they got someone from private industry that came in and manages those funds. And so what happens? When we sell land, the money that we make and I think this is important to understand we are not publicly funded, so we take zero tax money to fund our operations. Our operations are funded completely off of our business, so we self-fund ourselves. And then the profit that we make and we turn around $12 of profit for every dollar that we spend on operations, which is probably the envy of a lot of private industry.
Speaker 2:That's unreal. Yeah, it's an unreal amount of money that we can generate About $100 to $120 million a year is what we've been averaging recently, or even higher. That money then gets distributed in the permanent fund of whatever beneficiary the land was that it came from, and then that's managed like an endowment, just like an endowment would be at a university or something like that, and the interest and dividends of that, for sake of simplicity is then given to schools every year, based on their population and so local community councils in every school are the ones that decide how to use the money that's given to them.
Speaker 1:So, like the elementary school, like Red Mountain Elementary or one of the elementary schools here in Washington County, does get some slice of that pie and that distribution.
Speaker 2:Yes, and it's meant to be an endowment, so it'll go on permanently and that money is the only money that can be used that isn't earmarked for something else. So they have complete discretion. It's the only discretionary income that any school has. Now they have to use it for an educational purpose, right, you can't buy cheerleader uniforms or football helmets with it. It has to be for an educational purpose. But they get to decide at every school what that money goes for and how that's targeted.
Speaker 2:What's the amount of money each school gets? Do you have an idea? It depends on the size of the school. So a typical high school in the state will get anywhere from 120 to $200,000 a year.
Speaker 2:Middle school will get 90 to 120 and an elementary school will get 80 to 100. But they, you know, I would invite any of your listeners, if you know a principal, go talk to a principal of a public school and ask them how vital the Trustlands funds are that they spend. I would dare to venture that every principal says that those are some of the best monies that they spend because they go to things that they need Right. They can target I know, like Dixie High School, this has been several years ago. They can target I know, like Dixie high school and this has been several years ago targeted graduation rates and some schools target, you know, reading and some schools have to target technology for education and and it makes a difference, we have every month at our board meeting we have a different person from our one of the beneficiaries come and talk about how they use the money that's made. And it is I got it. It's emotional some months because it makes such a difference in the lives of people.
Speaker 1:So, so let's, let's push, push into the Northern corridor. My, my analysis, based on what I've heard so far, is and I don't know when, the green Springs it's exit 13. If you and I don't know when, the Green Springs it's exit 13. If you're looking at the map, right here, i-15, there's exit 13, grapevine Crossing, basically everything north of I-15, right around that exit 13,. There's a huge block of SITLA property that's there and I don't know when that was established. But from my thought about the Northern Corridor is that the purpose of that road, yes, is for traffic management. It's for a flow of traffic and planning out for the future, because the argument for the corridor goes back 20 plus years. The purpose of that road is to be able to maximize the value for SITLA. I feel like that is the center point as to the purpose and the need for that corridor. Am I misunderstanding that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's not the purpose for the road. That's the purpose we assign the road as SITLA, because we have to have a revenue-based decision for what we do. So let's just talk about, let's set the context of the whole reserve system, which goes back into the 90s, right, not long after we're formed. Uh, so you know the history two cons being built.
Speaker 1:They find the tortoise yeah, if you go back, if you're listening to this episode. I did two other episodes one with Eric Clark with the County he's the the County attorney, that's that's taking really the point lead on the battle with conserve Southwest Utah and the lawsuit with the Bureau of land management. Um, that episode is a great history on exactly this kind of the backstory of it. So if you didn't know this we could skip through it, but you can go back and listen to that episode. It's a great episode to talk about that.
Speaker 2:Right. So in 1996, right, they form this habitat conservation plan and so they decide what they're going to do is they're going to set apart different lands that can be used for the tortoises existence, and those will be set apart, and then for that, then you can build and develop and do what you need to do in the rest of the county. So that was set apart in 1996. And there was a thing called an incidental take permit. And then you know Eric Clark I don't know how much he geeked out on that when he was- here, he geeked out a little bit on it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know the legal geekiness there I mean. Essentially it boils down to any development for you to. If you're a landowner, private landowner, and you want to build something on it, it is contingent upon this permit right. So the federal government has said in Washington County if you don't protect the tortoise, you can't build a single building, you can't do anything else, that you have to be following a certain set of criteria to be able to develop.
Speaker 2:So it's contingent on that.
Speaker 2:So there was a huge fight in the nineties that there wasn't enough land set aside, and so what we did as an agency is we came in and said all right, there's habitat. This is North of green Springs, about 14,000 acres of habitat there. We're willing to put that into the pot for the HCP for the 20 years, with the commitment at the time that the federal government would either purchase or exchange us out of the property. Right, there's got to be a benefit to us. We're not public lands, we're private lands and so we need to be treated like private lands. So they made that commitment and we made the commitment to put the land in.
Speaker 1:That wraps part one of our two-part series with Kyle Paisley, the managing director of real estate for SITLA. Tune in next week when we get into a deeper dive into exactly what SITLA is going to be doing in the future with Zone 6, the Northern Corridor controversy and how they fit into that role. And please like and subscribe, Make sure we share this story out with everybody in Southern Utah. Happy holidays, everybody. We'll see you out there. Thanks for listening in. If you enjoyed this episode, please like and subscribe. Make sure you're following us on all the social media websites. We love your support. We love the dialogue. We want to continue that going.
Speaker 3:Find us at realestate435.com. We'd love to help you find a house here in town or help you get wherever you're going.