Danny Stewart, longtime economic development director for Cedar City and Iron County, in his office in Cedar City, Utah on Aug. 31, 2023, his last day of work before starting a new job with Utah Inland Port Authority. | Photo by Jeff Richards, St. George News / Cedar City News
CEDAR CITY — After serving for nearly a decade as Cedar City and Iron County’s economic development director, Danny Stewart is moving on to take a new state-level position with the Utah Inland Port Authority.
“It’s a really good transition for me,” Stewart said during a half-hour interview with Cedar City News in his office last Thursday afternoon, his last day of work as a Cedar City employee.
“Although I never planned on leaving this job until retirement, this was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up,” he said about the new job title as associate vice president of regional project area development for Utah Inland Port Authority.
Stewart was quick to add that even though his new job will take him out of town from time to time, he’ll continue to live and work in his longtime home of Cedar City.
“I’ll travel up to Salt Lake occasionally for meetings and do a lot of remote meetings,” he said. “I’ll actually be over southwestern corner of the state, from Juab County down.”
Stewart’s new position with the port authority was foreshadowed when he spoke during the recent launch of the Commerce Crossroads industrial park west of Cedar City. Commerce Crossroads is partnering with Utah Inland Port Authority to establish the state’s first rural inland port.
“For a long, long time we’ve been educating people and exporting them,” Stewart told those gathered for the groundbreaking ceremony on Aug. 22. “We’re going to provide more opportunities for those folks to stay here.”
Also speaking at that same event was Ben Hart, executive director of Utah Inland Port Authority, who called project “the most important economic initiative in the southwest part of the state for generations to come.”
“I worked with him quite a bit when he was at the Governor’s Office of Economic Opportunity,” Stewart said of Hart, his new boss. “I’ve worked with everyone on their staff.”
Stewart said he has been working on the concept of an inland port in Southwest Utah for the past several years.
“In 2016, when they were first batting this idea around of a Utah inland port, I looked at what we had been doing here for a long time,” Stewart said. “It’s the thing that makes the most sense for us, when it comes to business recruitment, is this advanced manufacturing, these companies that provide good, solid primary employment opportunities from day one.”
One key challenge, as described by Stewart, is, “How do we best utilize the rail spur that we have here and our connections, I-15, our airport, all of our transportation, to attract those types of companies here. to provide employment opportunities for people who want to stay here?”
Stewart said that even though he’s shifting gears by switching over to his new role with the inland port, “I’ll be doing essentially the same thing I’ve been doing before, but just completely focused on the industrial stuff. And then, like I said, from Juab County down, because there’s potential for other inland port project areas in other parts of the state.”
“Juab’s got rail,” Stewart said. “Beaver County’s got amazing rail. There’s other places where things can happen. And that’s what I’ll do, is help and do whatever I can to recruit to build out this port.”
Added Stewart: “Right now, one of every 10 jobs in Iron County is in manufacturing. Some are big companies like American Packaging and some are a half dozen people building and doing stuff.”
“We’ll have a lot of resources focused on recruiting those types of companies, which is really exciting,” Stewart added.
Stewart acknowledged that not everybody wants to work in manufacturing or industrial jobs.
However, he said, “A good percentage of people will find there’s really good, solid employment, if they want to stick around here. It’s one of our top wage sectors in our county’s economy.”
Stewart also noted that the inland port’s impact extends throughout all of southwestern Utah, not just Cedar City and Iron County.
As one case in point, he mentioned Litehouse Foods in Hurricane.
“For years, they’ve been looking for a solution to getting their food-grade oils here on train,” he said, noting that RailSync’s new transloading facility at Commerce Crossroads will allow Litehouse to get the needed supplies to its plant by truck in 40 minutes, instead of two or three days.
Stewart said his fascination with economic development began in the late 1980s when he was attending college at Southern Utah University
“I was a student at SUU, actually working for the student newspaper, when Cedar City hired their first economic development director,” Stewart said. “His name is Terrence Bride. I interviewed him and I thought, this is fascinating. I remember the circumstances. The mine had shut down. It was a tremendous negative impact in the county to have the mine shut down. It was really one of the top industrial drivers in the county.”
“I guess what they looked at was, what do we have that makes sense here in Cedar City?” he recalled. “So they hired Terrence Bride, I think it was 1987. After I met Terrence when I was a reporter, I just started following him, along with the others that followed after him. I worked very closely with a couple of them.”
Years later, Stewart said, he began working for Cedar City Corp. as an assistant to economic development events in 2011.
“After two and a half years of doing that, I got hired to be the economic development director in 2014,” he said.
Stewart says he’s planning to work very closely with whomever is hired as his successor.
“I’m looking forward to seeing who they get here, because I anticipate I’ll be working with this person a lot,” he said.
City officials said the hiring process is still in its early stages, with the application period having closed on Sept. 1.
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