Before the Utah Department of Transportation’s public comment period for the Heber Valley bypass ends on March 9, Heber City Councilors Yvonne Barney and Aaron Cheatwood and Mayor Heidi Franco will be signing the Wasatch County Council’s letter to UDOT rejecting its preferred route.
That route, Alternative B, cuts through the North Fields between Potters Lane and 900 North instead of keeping traffic on U.S. 40 between those two roads, as Alternative A does. The letter asks that Alternative B be shifted east, running as close to U.S. 40 as possible.
That’s similar to North Fields Irrigation Company’s request. It has controlled water use in the North Fields since 1860.
Since 2022, board members have met privately with UDOT representatives and urged them not to build the bypass in the North Fields. But UDOT identified Alternative B as its preferred route in January.
In response, North Fields Irrigation Company submitted a public comment outlining 99 deficiencies with the route and asked UDOT to choose Alternative A or to realign Alternative B as close to U.S. 40 as possible.
North Fields Irrigation Company Vice President Ed Clyde owns about 75 acres in the North Fields that have been in his family for seven generations. During last Saturday’s protest against the bypass, Clyde explained that realigning Alternative B closer to U.S. 40 would likely result in the highway cutting straight through a small piece of his property.
“But I don’t care,” he said. “I want to help with that if it’ll save the North Fields.”
Wasatch County’s letter, drafted by Wasatch County Councilor Erik Rowland, shares Clyde’s mission.
The letter argues that the North Fields deserve protection for their historical significance, pointing to Heber City and Wasatch County actions, municipal planning and voter initiatives as evidence.
One of these pieces of evidence was a joint comment submitted by Heber City and Wasatch County in July 2022 urging UDOT not to build the bypass in the North Fields.
“(The North Fields) represents the broad patterns of Wasatch County’s agricultural heritage and rural character; properties included in the North Fields include those of locally significant historical persons; and the North Fields represents a collectively distinguishable entity valued by the public as being of locally significant historical value,” the 2022 letter says.
Rowland’s letter also argues that the realignment of Alternative B would be more compatible with Wasatch County’s goals of protecting open space and establishing conservation easements while also protecting water quality.
In both alternatives A and B, the entire project area of the Heber Valley bypass lies within the contributing area to the Heber Valley Aquifer, which belongs to the most protected aquifer class in Utah because of its pristine water quality.
The Wasatch County Council’s letter argues the bypass would threaten groundwater through several ways: highway stormwater infiltration, de-icing chemicals, long-term pollutant migration and spill risks. It argues that realigning Alternative B closer to U.S. 40 poses the least risk to the aquifer because U.S. 40 already has mitigation measures in place.
But realigning Alternative B closer to U.S. 40 could result in the sacrifice of existing properties along the highway.
“This is a hard solution … because it does directly affect people on Highway 40. I haven’t had the chance to talk with all those property owners. I’ll do that personally, and I’m hoping to in the coming months,” Rowland said. “Some have proactively approached me and said, ‘We understand that, yes, our home will be targeted, but we also understand … that we’re taking one for the team. We don’t want the North Fields to be affected.’”
The idea of sacrificing existing properties to preserve the North Fields received mixed responses from public commenters.
“Is this representative government? You don’t talk to the people that you impact? It galls me to think that’s what we’ve turned into,” said Neil Richardson, a North Fields landowner.
Meanwhile, Kevin Connelly, who has lived in Heber City for 48 years, was in favor of the realignment.
“No matter what route this takes, somebody is going to be affected by it. That’s an unfortunate reality when you build a highway,” he said. “Preserve those beautiful North Fields because once they’re gone, they’re gone forever.”
Rowland’s letter was controversial among the City Council, city staff and the public.
Rowland said that he used AI to analyze UDOT’s draft environmental impact study before he wrote the letter, and he encouraged others to do the same. Former Heber City Council candidate Corey Noyes called this confirmation bias based on the premise that Alternative B is the wrong choice. He referred to the Wasatch County Council’s letter as “a small group of non-experts using artificial intelligence to poke holes through (the study).”
Many who spoke out against the realignment did so out of fear that it could further delay the bypass, which has been the talk of the town for decades and became an official project in 2019.
“This community sometimes has a tendency to push back on things until we don’t get what is actually needed,” said City Engineer Russ Funk. “Main Street traffic is terrible. … It is a blight on our community, and it does need to be fixed.”
He added that he believed Alternative B was a longer-term traffic solution than Alternative A and that he was not concerned about the degradation of water quality in the Heber Valley Aquifer.
“I do not see a difference (between) moving the road over by Highway 40 or moving the road out in the middle (of the North Fields). You are going to have the same impacts with the water,” he said. “And to be fully honest with you, the biggest threat(s) to water quality in the North Fields (are) cows and agriculture.”
Heber City resident Linda Middleton pushed back, asking if agriculture was Funk’s “speciality,” and he admitted it was not.
City Councilor Mike Johnston agreed that cattle posed a greater threat to water quality in the North Fields than the bypass, along with the rest of Funk’s comments.
“I’m not worried about many of the things that (Rowland) listed in here,” he said. “(UDOT had) six years to do it, and I think they’ve done a pretty thorough job.”
City Councilor Sid Ostergaard agreed that the project needed to “stay the course.” He was not concerned about environmental impacts and believed the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers would hold UDOT to a sufficient standard for environmental protections.
Johnston and Ostergaard’s refusal to sign the letter led to a motion by City Councilor Yvonne Barney to allow elected officials to sign the letter as individuals instead of signing it as a governing body. Her motion passed unanimously.
Barney and Franco will sign the letter. Both were reelected in November and ran on campaigns that emphasized protecting open space and water quality. They also were the only members of the Heber City Council to join the protest against the bypass last Saturday.
Cheatwood will also sign the letter.
“One of the things that I was asked when I was running for this office was, do I support a bypass through the North Fields? And my answer then was no, but if it was the best route, I would support it because the best route, the thing that impacts the most citizens, is important to me,” he said. “I still feel that way. I look at that map, and I just can’t imagine why the option we got as option B went right through the middle (of the North Fields).”
Cheatwood cited the bisecting of farms and potential decline of agriculture in the North Fields as reasons he was against Alternative B. He added that realigning the route closer to U.S. 40 could mitigate development pressure in the North Fields.
UDOT has promised to prevent any transportation access in the North Fields other than the bypass, but many opponents of Alternative B have doubted that UDOT and the Wasatch County and Heber City councils could resist developing in the North Fields in perpetuity if a highway were built there.
City Councilor Morgan Murdock, who was elected in November, has not yet made a decision as to whether to sign the letter. He said his biggest reservation was potentially delaying the project.
He said after the meeting that he would be doing more research into UDOT’s draft environmental impact study and asking Rowland further questions.
During the 2025 municipal election, Murdock was the only one of the six candidates for mayor or City Council on the November ballot who did not publicly identify whether he preferred Alternative A or B for the bypass. He maintained the position that he was continuing to research the issue.