Home Care In Rockville, UT

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Rockville celebrated a first when the small town in the Zion National Park access corridor named a new mayor last month.

Pam Leach, a former town councilwoman, became the first woman to hold the mayor’s office since the town was incorporated in 1987. She was appointed to fill a mid-term vacancy created by Mayor Tracy Dutson’s resignation.

“I’m quite proud of that,” Leach said Thursday. “At my last election to the council, I’m proud to say, I received a lot of votes and support. And since my appointment I’ve been approached by a number of residents who’ve said they were glad I’m the mayor.”

Dutson and his wife intend to move because of his employment, so Leach will fill the final two years of his term until the next election, she said. She was the only person to file as a potential replacement by the deadline, so the town is now seeking to fill the mid-term vacancy she has left on the council.

Leach and her husband bought property in Rockville in 1992 and moved there full-time three years later.

She was first elected to the Town Council a decade ago after then-Mayor Dan McGuire encouraged her to formalize her community volunteerism. Three terms later, she has been mayor pro-tem under two different administrations and has helped guide residents through recent studies to determine the town’s future.

“At the top of our priority list is the bridge project,” she said, referring to the historic 92-year-old structure that connects the town’s primary residences to fields on the south side of the Virgin River, where the Grafton ghost town is located, and to nearby outdoor recreation destination Gooseberry Mesa.

“Obviously, the bridge is a symbol of who we are,” Leach said.

The Utah Joint Highway Committee approved $3.2 million three years ago to build a new bridge after the Utah Department of Transportation found the historic structure spanning the Virgin River was suffering “significant deterioration” that reduced its load rating.

That meant some emergency and commercial vehicles might not be able to access the south side of the river.

Former Mayor Dan McGuire helped obtain an engineering study that outlined three potential solutions — building a new bridge beside the old one and leaving the old bridge as a pedestrian and bicyclist crossing, tearing down the old bridge and replacing it with a new one, or rehabilitating the old one without a new bridge.

The JHC provided funding for a new bridge without opining on what residents might do with the old structure, Chris Potter, UDOT’s “local government program engineer,” said last week.

The Spectrum & Daily News previously reported that the JHC had provided an additional $200,000 for converting the old bridge to a pedestrian and bike-friendly structure, which Potter and Leach said is incorrect.

Leach, the third mayor to hold office since McGuire’s term ended, said the town continues to hope UDOT will fund rehabilitation of the old bridge to preserve it and its quaint historic value instead of only funding a new bridge. Rockville has posted results of resident surveys on its website that show 74 percent of the people prefer restoring the old bridge to its former capacity.

At a UDOT Transportation Commission meeting in November, Rockville Town Councilman Mark Hartless, speaking as an audience member and not in an official role, raised the question anew.

“If you want to save that (existing) bridge, I’d figure out where it can be moved to and still keep the quaintness. Something like that where you all get together and get your wrenches out and take it apart and put it back somewhere else,” Commission Chairman Jeff Holt replied. “That (road) seems to be the place where the traffic does converge. Keeping the quaint bridge there doesn’t solve the rest of the problems, but I agree … Keep the quaint bridge somewhere.”

But in January the town obtained the results of a new engineering feasibility study that states it will be possible to rehabilitate the old bridge to its former standards for $2.1 million.

Leach said officials intend to again approach a subcommittee of the JHC on April 21 to propose “changing the scope of work” from a new bridge to the old one at a meeting in St. George.

If they are successful, the proposal will advance to the full commission the following day, Potter said.

Leach said with full rehabilitation of the bridge, its life could be extended another 30 years before some additional work may be needed to extend its life another 25 years beyond that.

In the meantime, she expects the town to grow and visitation to Zion National Park to increase, as well as visitation to Gooseberry Mesa and Grafton. If the town is successful in redirecting funds to bridge rehabilitation, it will buy time for consideration of a location for a new bridge sometime in the future.

At a meeting last month, residents identified their perceived capacity for growth to cap out at 350 residents, defined in large part by geographical limitations as well as limited culinary water capacity.

Bridge rehabilitation could be completed by next year, whereas construction of a new bridge would take until 2018, Leach said.

Follow Kevin Jenkins, @SpectrumJenkins. Call him at 435-674-6253.

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As Springdale grappled with an increase of new and converted short-term rentals, town leaders temporarily banned all new transient lodging applications at the beginning of 2022.

“We're seeing a lot of places that were previously retail … converted to nightly rentals,” Springdale Mayor Barbara Bruno said. “We've had a lot of national park [workers] or employees of businesses in the town having to move out of their long-term rentals because they're being converted to short-term rentals.”

Sara Jane Teal works for a local guide company and has lived in Springdale since 2019. Her lease ends in April and she doesn’t have the option to re-sign. She said the building is changing ownership and there’s a chance it could become a short-term rental.

Teal said it’s sad to see local people and businesses displaced because of tourist lodging.

“At what point are you like, we need to help our locals out because they're here making all of this run, or are we going to choose all these visitors?” she said. “I feel frustrated because sometimes it feels easier to overlook the people that are working really hard to keep [the integrity of] Springdale, Rockville and Virgin.”

Teal is looking elsewhere for housing and may end up somewhere “down the hill” in the Hurricane and LaVerkin area. That would mean she’d have to spend more time and money commuting to work.

“I would love to stay in Springdale just because my job's there,” she said. “It's wonderful and I feel very privileged to get to wake up and walk three minutes to my place of work.”

When Emily Moran began looking for a place to live near Zion, she was told to expect to live as far as an hour and a half away from the park. Moran is moving from Massachusetts to start work as an archivist at the Great Basin Institute at the park. She said she took a pay cut accepting the job and was surprised it wasn’t cheaper to live in a more rural area.

Moran and her partner were able to find a place in Washington — just under an hour commute.

“If it was for the sake of the park and the people living there full time and have had family living in the area, if it was to protect them, then I feel okay with it,” Moran said. “If it's because people are buying up housing and pricing people out and it's unaffordable, then I feel upset about that.”

As part of the transient lodging moratorium, a taskforce of elected leaders, residents and business owners was formed to come up with recommendations to address the issue. Bruno, who’s part of the group, said they’re trying to strike a balance between property rights of landowners and preserving quality of life for residents.

She said they’re also thinking about the visitors that come to the area — over 5 million people visited Zion last year. Bruno said tourists that stay in Springdale are better for the town.

“The ideal visitor is one that comes and stays in a hotel or a legal nightly rental here in town,” she said. “[This kind of visitor] parks their car and rides a shuttle into the park and patronizes our businesses and maybe rides a bike and doesn't drive a private vehicle around.”

Other elected leaders in the area are dealing with the same issue. Last year unincorporated parts of Washington County enacted a similar moratorium on short-term rentals. The county commission passed an ordinance limiting the size of these rentals and requiring them to be owner-occupied.

The moratorium in Springdale is in effect until mid-July.

The National Labor College is selling its 47-acre Silver Spring campus, and Georgetown University and Montgomery College have stepped forward as potential buyers.

Begun as the George Meany Center for Labor Studies, the college is devoted to the education of union members. But with union membership dwindling, the college is no longer able to keep up with the costs of maintaining the property and debt payments remaining from previous construction projects.

To address its budget issues, the college decided to sell its campus, located on New Hampshire Avenue adjacent to the Capital Beltway, and although real estate developers have toured the property, the two schools have emerged as the most likely purchasers.

Georgetown would use the campus for varsity sports and possible meeting space and is looking to create a partnership with the county to purchase the property. The team's sports programs currently compete at nine sites in the region, with the baseball team's home games in Cabin John. Separately, the university has begun exploring where to acquire another 100 acres for an expansion in the District.

“We’re very interested in that site for possible athletic fields and maybe conference space,” university spokeswoman Stacy Kerr said.

Montgomery College enrolls roughly 60,000 students in credit and non-credit community college programs annually and has campuses in Germantown, Rockville and Takoma Park. It continues to grow, and has opened a math and science center at its Rockville campus in 2011.

Elizabeth Homan, spokeswoman for the college, cautioned that the school has not submitted a formal bid. “We have toured the site, but no decisions have been made and there hasn’t been any offer,” she said.

But Homan said that as more high school graduates turn to community colleges they are looking for the experience of campus life at a four-year school, and that requires more space.

“They’re not just coming to Montgomery College, taking their classes and leaving,” she said. “They want the full, rich campus experience, with student life, with places to be, and places to study, and places to learn.”

Montgomery County Council member Valerie Ervin, a former dean at the labor college, said she encouraged Montgomery College President DeRionne P. Pollard to tour the property this summer. “It was the first time she’d seen it, and she fell in love with it,” Ervin said.

Multiple sources with knowledge of the sales process said that developer Macerich, based in Santa Monica, Calif., had considered a bid for the property and discussed the possibility of building a shopping center on the site with county officials. A Macerich spokeswoman said the deal was not something the company was pursuing.

Despite ample green space and only having nine buildings, the campus carries some complications for commercial development. For one, the Labor College is still operating on the campus, with 506 students enrolled this fall, and plans to continue operating.

After the campus sells, James Gentile, general counsel for the National Labor College, said the school would remain open, either on the campus as a tenant or elsewhere. “We are in discussions with potential purchasers now and one of the possibilities with some of the purchasers is that the college could remain to operate on the campus,” he said.

Ervin said that she would like to see the property remain as an educational campus and was happy to consider the possibility of the county partnering with one or both of the schools to accomplish that. “I think there are a lot of conversations right now about how to make a deal like that work,” she said.

Development giant Trammell Crow Co. has gained site plan approval for a trio of new life science buildings on Johns Hopkins’ Belward Campus in Rockville, bringing that erstwhile farm a step closer to what could wind up becoming a considerable amount of new development.

“Life sciences and biotherapeutics is one of the most explosive industries, and it needs growth,” Eric Fischer, a Trammell Crow managing director, told the Montgomery County Planning Board at a public hearing March 30. “It's very disruptive to up and move out to another location, so what makes this site truly world-class is the ability to grow in place.” In other words, he said, Trammell could tell its commercial tenants, “You'll be in one building, and as you have new intellectual property come to life, there's another opportunity for you five years down the road.”

Fischer was referring to Trammell’s plan to build three buildings, together comprising about 756,000 square feet, “for research and development, biotechnology offices, and related labs,” according to a planning department staff report. They’ll go on the northern portion of Johns Hopkins’ 107-acre Belward Farm site at 9951 Key West Ave., which Trammell ground-leased from the university last year. The Planning Board unanimously green lighted the site plan March 30.

The approval represents the first of several potential future phases. Trammell’s project could ultimately expand up to nearly 1.6 million square feet, though follow-on additions would require separate site plans.

The whole Belward site technically has the county-approved capacity to yield 4.7 million square feet of new development. That’s a theoretical number, unlikely to be reached, as it would require the site’s remaining southwestern portion to yield an enormously higher density than what its developed and developing portions have yet yielded. Even so, to Fischer's point, as long as the life science industry wants to grow its real estate footprint in Montgomery County, Belward offers a great deal of space do so.

Fischer wasn’t immediately available for additional comment, but said in an emailed statement that Belward represents “an exceptional opportunity to advance science, research, and discovery in a best-in-class manner within the County and the State of Maryland.”

The three buildings in this first installment of Trammell’s phased buildout would weigh in at about 298,000 square feet, 265,000 square feet and 193,000 square feet, respectively, rising to between 100 feet and 150 feet tall.

The plan also calls for a parking garage, a 6,000-square-foot retail pavilion next to a roughly 1-acre “urban green,” new roads, plus about half of what will eventually become the 14-acre Muddy Branch Park.

The park, along Muddy Branch Road on Belward’s northwestern corner, will be privately owned but open to the public. The half of the park addressed in the present site plan would include an athletic field, lawns and pedestrian pathways, among other features, per the staff report. The remaining half of the park would come to fruition as part of future development phases.

Life science labs have been a hot submarket recently, especially in Montgomery County, which is home to the headquarters of the Food and Drug Administration and National Institutes of Health. It’s also close to the U.S. Army’s biomedical R&D activity at Fort Dietrich and research giant Johns Hopkins’ main campus in Baltimore. The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, ARPA-H, we know will go somewhere in Greater Washington, though not yet specifically where.

The industry’s growth in the region has cooled a bit, with a “dislocation within the capital markets” having “paused new construction starts,” Tommy Cleaver, an executive vice president with real estate giant CBRE, said in an email. “[B]ut demand for our regional talent base is resilient,” he added, with projects like Belward representing “welcomed additions to our market.”

SALT LAKE CITY — The beautiful weather that has blanketed most of Utah for nearly a week will come to an end late Tuesday, especially in the northern part of the state.

LIVE RADAR: Check out the rain headed to your neighborhood

Large parts of southern Utah experienced light rain and gusty winds throughout the morning and afternoon, with showers expected to move into the Salt Lake area in the evening. Wind gusts were measured at 52 miles per hour at St. George Airport at 3:40 p.m., just below severe limits.

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A Flash Flood Warning has been issued for parts of Zion National Park, including Pine Creek, Lower Clear Creek, Spry Canyon and Keyhole Canyon. It also includes the towns of Springdale and Rockville.

The warning is in effect through 8 p.m. The National Weather Service said the storms creating the potential flooding are moving north through Zion Canyon, and anyone in the area is advised to "Move to higher ground NOW!"

The potential for flash floods in southern Utah remains in the "probable" range for many of the area's other parks and attractions, including Arches, Canyonlands, and Capitol Reef national parks. A third of an inch of rain was reported in parts of the Bryce Canyon area Tuesday.

Rain conditions in northern Utah will continue into the weekend, with snow in higher elevations expected along with the rain in the valley. Isolated thunderstorms will bring heavy downpours and winds starting Tuesday evening.

A stronger storm system is expected by the end of the week that will bring more rain and much cooler temperatures, with lows hitting the 40s by Sunday.

The Salt Lake City office of the NWS forecasts that the potential for the coldest temperatures of the season exists for next week.