Earlier this month, Micah Kagan of Kamas sent a letter titled, “Bypass offers opportunity,” to The Park Record to express his opinion that — given the Heber Valley Bypass currently being negotiated by the Utah Department of Transportation — Heber City officials ought to take the opportunity and consider reworking its main street to “create a sense of place that people will want to come and experience.”
Upon reading the letter, Director for the Community Alliance for Main Street Rachel Kahler jokingly said she began to consider reaching out to her relatives in Kamas to figure out where Kagan lives and how she could find and tell him about the extensive efforts that already exist in Heber City’s current long-term plan to do just what he recommended and take advantage of the opportunities the bypass would offer.
After realizing that personally tracking Kagan down might not be in her best interest, Kahler reached out to The Park Record to discuss the ongoing plans about Main Street, the developments people can expect to see in the heart of the town and how those efforts can be funded to secure a better future for the businesses, locals and visitors within the municipality.
Kahler, a former city councilor, said Heber City’s Community Alliance For Main Street was formed in 2004. At the time, a couple of Main Street business owners were concerned Heber City would install the cobra-style structures that were popular at the time, and they urged officials to consider something more tasteful. A simple late-night drive down Main Street is a testament to the business owners’ victory, and the alliance’s ambitions have only grown since then.
“Fast forward to now. I’ve been in my position about 45 days,” Kahler said.
After just finishing her four years as a city councilor in January, she’s ready to take some of the things she learned and helped develop and implement them into her current role in securing a positive future for Main Street and Heber City’s downtown sector.
Don’t pass on the bypass
Kahler said she recently had a conversation with a Heber Valley local who attended high school in the area in the ’60s. Even then, he told her, conversations about a traffic bypass were already gaining prominence throughout the community as people considered how to get truckers off of Main Street.
“At that time, they were looking at both an eastern bypass that would take traffic from Uinta Basin to Salt Lake and a western bypass,” Kahler said.
From what she understands, the conversation halted when local businesses grew concerned the loss of traffic would mean a loss of patrons.
Then and now, she said the passage has served as an artery through the heart of the community.
“My family moved here in the ’70s, and I remember vividly Dairy Keen and Snow Keen were the big ice cream places,” Kahler said. “You would drag Main Street as a high schooler.”
Today, that artery has become clogged, and the community has taken note of the dangers that the situation poses traffic slows, car accidents become more commonplace and pedestrians are struck by vehicles.
“What we’re seeing now in 2024 is too many vehicles on Main Street,” Kahler said. “Semis, RVs, recreation vehicles, passenger vehicles. We see on some days almost 40,000 vehicles passing through on Main Street, and it’s coming to a point where you don’t dare take a left turn without being at a stoplight.”
She said Former Heber City Mayor Kelleen Potter approached UDOT officials and urged them to begin to search for a viable bypass.
“Wasatch County has been purchasing land on the western side of Heber City for almost two decades,” Kahler said. “They had a proposal that would run perpendicular to Southfield Road, but they never really did finalize where it would go as far as coming in on the south or where it would exit on the north.”
The city, she said, has allocated $1.4 million in infrastructure to make sure Main Street’s intersection with 900 North is equipped with a traffic light as she said it would be “the most attractive intersection to reconnect that western bypass here at the north end.”
Regardless of what Heber City or Wasatch County might want, however, the ball currently sits firmly in UDOT’s court.
Last fall, the department was supposed to release a draft environmental impact statement showing which of the five routes it is considering would be best.
After noticing more development on the north side of the community last fall, officials decided to delay their decision until this year. This year, after reviewing a traffic study from the Mountainlands Association of Governments, they once again delayed their decision, though without a clear timeline.
According to UDOT’s website, three of the five routes are now no longer viable, and they are working to alter the passageway possibilities.
“It is unclear how substantial changes to the action alternatives could be at this time as a result of the new travel demand model,” the website states.
In the meantime, the Heber City Council members and Wasatch County Council members who once shared somewhat opposing views of where the bypass should go have started to close the gaps between their opinions.
Kahler said that in April she did hear from a UDOT official that he anticipates the bypass being complete in time for the 2034 Olympics.
“If you go out onto Main Street on a Friday afternoon or a Saturday morning, gosh,” she said. “You want that bypass sooner rather than later.”
Downtown
In the city’s Envision Central Heber general plan first published in 2020, there are several guiding principles and ideas Heber City officials are encouraged to follow to help the downtown area and its businesses thrive and prosper.
One of the most prominent strategies city officials are currently trying to implement is a community reinvestment agency, which would use tax increments from Heber City, Wasatch County, the Wasatch County School District and several other entities to fund infrastructure projects that would benefit the area, increase the affected parcels’ values and in turn create a higher tax base for the entities that invest.
The taxing corporations would continue to receive the taxes they currently get, but as taxes in the project area increase in the coming years — not from any artificial spikes but from raising property values — Wasatch County, the Wasatch County School District and the Central Utah Water Conservancy District would give 75% of that increase to the reinvestment project. Those would go toward projects that increase property values, thus further increasing taxes, and the process would continue for 20 years.
So far, despite Heber City Councilors presenting the plan to both the school district and county and soliciting their feedback, Heber City and the Central Utah Water Conservancy are the only entities that have decided to join.
“I want to give a specific example because I think we have to illustrate what that looks like,” Kahler said. “Tom Stone purchased the Heber Bank Block and redeveloped and restored that old historical bank block building that Heber Valley Bank is in. Next to it, he actually purchased the Heber Mercantile, and at the time it was a dilapidated building, no historical real significance, but it was a building that had a couple of stores and restaurants.”
He renovated the building, and while many of the building’s old tenants weren’t able to stay due to the increased rent, the update attracted several businesses that have proved popular within the community, such as Fish Heads Fly Shop and Midway Design Interiors.
“Tom invested several million dollars into that building, and now his property taxes are also higher,” Kahler said. “As he will tell you, he was happy to pay the increase because of the economic value that those tenants brought to the community. … While some people may be concerned that it’s running out small businesses, it also provides an opportunity for new business that could also be small business.”
Kahler clarified that money raised through the community reinvestment agency would not go to developers to redo buildings like Stone did but would allow for public projects that would benefit the downtown area as a whole. There are plans to potentially use the funds for a central public-parking area so businesses won’t need individual lots or to construct a footpath that would connect Main Street Park to Heber City Town Square.
Kahler said Heber City has already asked the Wasatch County Fire District and Heber Light and Power for the first right of refusal when the two entities are ready to sell their properties near the intersection of 100 West and 100 South, since the area would be a great place for centralized parking similar to Park City’s China Bridge Garage.
“That parking structure would then allow these businesses to not be required to have parking on site,” Kahler said. “That could be something that might take several years without the CRA, but with the CRA, they can bond or loan against the increase of taxes because they know that they will be coming in the future.”
Conversations with the county and school district are ongoing, Kahler said, and she’s confident they will work with Heber City to invest in the project. If they don’t, she said projects that would take years could stretch to decades, and the city’s downtown would miss its potential. Both Wasatch County and the Wasatch County School District have notably higher tax rates than Heber City.
“I’m really hopeful that through additional conversations they will come to an agreement and that we can resolve some of their concerns,” she said. “It really is vital that those two entities come to the table.”
Without them, there will still be a community reinvestment agency for Heber City, but its effectiveness will drop.