River Rats 

“I forgot my pint of rum,” laughs Jordan River advocate Adriaan Boogaard. “If you swallow any of this shit, it’s good to have a chaser of sorts.”

He’s taking me on a kayaking trip down the “challenging half” of the 55-mile river that flows north from Utah Lake across the Salt Lake valley and filters out into the shallow saline depths of the Great Salt Lake. He wants to demonstrate from the river’s perspective some of the problems developers have burdened the river with.

For a couple of hours, I practice my novice strokes in a solo kayak in the slow-running part of the river at the Salt Lake County-Davis County border. Algae and dark, unattractive gunk drift past. Across the river, a Peruvian goat herder watches over part of an 800-strong bleating herd munching on Russian thistles at the water’s edge.

Satisfied with my fledgling skills, Boogaard tosses our kayaks in the back of his beat-up red truck, and we head for an entry point on the river by a new housing subdivision at the opposite end of the valley at 13500 South.

Along with a life vest, the tall, lanky Boogaard, whose glasses magnify his intense stare, gives me a padded helmet to wear. “Stray golf balls,” he mutters, referring to the several golf courses he expects us to encounter going down the river.

We don’t get as far as the golf courses, though. I tip over into the surging gray-green waters moments after pushing away from the bank. Undeterred, but drenched head to toe, I push out a second time. I start to get the feel of the rainand runoff-swollen river, even as the currents drive first Boogaard and then me under a bridge so close to our boats, we have to lean all the way forward to avoid colliding with it—a common Jordan problem, Boogaard notes.

He shouts out instructions to paddle across the forceful current to the river’s inside bend. But I overcorrect and paddle instead into some low-hanging branches. The river spins the kayak around, then rolls it over. For a few frightening seconds, I’m caught beneath the kayak in the dark depths of the Jordan, panicking, fighting to get out. Then abruptly, I’m dragged out of the kayak by the current. I bob to the surface, gasping for air, trying to find the river floor beneath my feet, only for the river to rush me toward half-immersed tree limbs. I grab hold of a branch, but the river pushes me against the collapsed tree. The thought flashes through my mind how easy it would be to drown.

I either have to let go and surrender to the river or get further entangled in the tree as the water bears down on me. I let go, shoot under the branches, then float for a moment, twirling round as if on an amusement park ride, before I manage to stand up and fight my way to the bank. Boogaard patiently paddles ahead in the river, having already secured my errant kayak.

Eventually, I meet up with Boogaard under the bridge that carries the Bangerter Highway over the Jordan. A newly built dirt road curves around from Bangerter to parallel the Jordan for a good half-mile. It turns out the road is for South Valley Sewer District’s estimated $135 million sewage treatment plant yet to be built. “Here we go again,” Boogaard says, when he sees the raised dirt track plowing through lush farmland. One more development to monitor on the river this bachelor loves.

Boogaard’s passion for the Jordan is infectious. How else to explain my decision, despite an utter lack of boating experience, to kayak down a fast-flowing stretch of the river? But then, the few men and women, most of them in their 40s and 50s, who are fighting for the Jordan’s survival are understandably myopic when it comes to their quest.

Among those, along with Boogaard, who yearn for the unruly, meandering creature it was many decades ago are three key activists: Ray Wheeler, a wiry, white-haired adventurer and 30-year space planner for the University of Utah; the laid-back Zach Frankel, founder of nonprofit Utah Rivers Council; and red-haired, former Great Salt Lakekeeper Jeff Salt, arguably the most controversial figure in Utah environmentalism, even before June 2, 2008, when he allegedly badly beat his then-girlfriend with a pipe. On July 8, Salt is going on trial in 3rd District Court in Salt Lake City for a felony count of aggravated assault. Salt won’t comment on anything related to his legal problems.

Boogaard works for Salt Lake City’s water department identifying leaking water pipes. He and Wheeler, are, says the latter, “ministers without portfolios,” fighting for the Jordan on their own time. It can be a bitter and exhausting battle. Frankel says the Jordan is symbolic of the problems facing all rivers in Utah. Unlike states as diverse as Idaho, California and Washington, Utah has no statewide river protection act, he says. While Utah’s rivers may have no legal protection, the Jordan can at least claim the Blueprint Jordan, published in December 2008 by nonprofit Envision Utah, a $300,000 plan funded by Salt Lake County, other municipalities, grants and donors. It included surveys of 2,000 people weighing in on the Jordan’s future.

When the glossy 60-page brochure came out, Jordan advocates might have been forgiven for thinking the tide was turning in their favor. Not only did they have mayors such as Salt Lake County’s Peter Corroon, Taylorsville’s Russ Wall and Murray’s Dan Snarr publicly supporting the river’s future, the Blueprint’s survey showed the public wanted to protect the 7,000 acres of undeveloped land along the Jordan corridor, half of which is zoned for development. According to Envision’s executive director Alan Matheson, “the clear message was most of the public really wanted to preserve those undeveloped areas as recreational, open space and wildlife corridors.” Boogaard says that, “Without Corroon and Envision Utah, we’d be spinning our wheels. They’d be building whatever, wherever.”

But in the months since the Blueprint’s publication, some of those who championed its transparency when it came to gathering citizen input are now calling it not so much a whitewash but, as Ray Wheeler puts it, “a greenwash.”

Wheeler sat in on planning discussions relating to the Blueprint. He learned, he says, that municipalities had identified 14 locations for commercial and residential developments. Envision Utah’s report describes some of these developments as regional river centers that include “recreational-support facilities and dining opportunities.” The report shows nine possible sites, three of which would be in Salt Lake City. The “river centers,” the report acknowledges in the final pages, would include mixed-use development concepts, including commercial and residential properties.

Envision’s Matheson, however, says the centers reflect the public’s appetite for having a modicum of development by the river—a brew pub, a café, perhaps an entertainment district like you’d find along the San Antonio, Texas, river walk. “What forms those areas, if any, actually take,” he acknowledges, “will depend on local jurisdiction with land-use authority.” The Blueprint, he adds, “holds the greatest promise we have ever had to create a world-class river corridor.” While he admits the river has an image problem, he urges Salt Lakers not to think “necessarily what the river is but what it can be.”

Activists like Ray Wheeler are acutely aware they are fighting to preserve undeveloped land while having to acknowledge the political reality that pieces may well be sold to developers to fund the purchase of other chunks of the shrinking wilderness.

DANCING WITH WOLVES
When Utah Rivers Council executive director Ted Wilson was a child in the 1940s, he recalls that the Jordan was “nothing but a sewer conduit,” where he says you might find a dead horse and an old jalopy. Others remember enormous catfish bloated from feeding on carcasses and blood dumped by slaughterhouses. The 15 cities through which the Jordan flows ran their untreated sewage lines into the river, on the theory, Wilson says, that the salt in the Great Salt Lake “would take care of it.” In the 1970s, the Environmental Protection Agency forced cities to clean up their acts. Newly installed sewer systems could only dump effluent into the river that met federal standards.

Boogaard grew up near the Jordan. In the late 1970s, he lived a Huck Finn teenagehood, whether hanging out with elderly farmers or catching snakes and frogs with friends. Several years ago, he bought his Dutch immigrant parents’ home in Murray. He started remodeling it, then instead set about restoring native plants to the 10 acres of Murray river bank where he played as a child. “He’s like a mother bear protecting his back yard,” Wheeler says admiringly.

Boogaard’s friend Eric McCulley, who runs the state-owned Legacy Nature Preserve that protects the final three miles of the river before its dissolution in the Great Salt Lake, believes the Jordan is at a turning point, thanks to the clean-up efforts by activists like Boogaard, Wheeler and Salt. More and more, people want to clean it up. River garbage, he says, has been reduced “by a million percent.”

Travel with Boogaard on the river and it’s clear, he says, “the river has many faces.” Some of them can be beautiful, some are dangerous, while others “just irritate the hell out of me.”

In order for kayakers to get beyond the dam near Camp Williams in Bluffdale, they have to get out of the water and portage their boats across railroad tracks. There is no trail or path for them to do so, let alone a train signal to ensure they can safely cross the tracks. Bridge builders’ disregard for boaters is also apparent near 7000 South, where in 2008, Utah Transit Authority installed two I-beams. The beams are like enormous knives under a transit bridge, around which, Boogaard says, unwary canoers or kayakers could wrap their boats. Such debris-gathering obstructions are called “strainers” or “death traps” by kayakers, Frankel says. UTA spokesman Gerry Carpenter notes canoe protectors will be wrapped around the beams when the new bridge is completed in the fall.

Further down the river, near the Jordan River Parkway trail, Boogaard’s mood improves, briefly, while perusing the east bank between 3300 and 3900 South—across from the Salt Lake County Metro Jail. There he finds, wetlands replete with native plants and cottonwood trees. “This is the way it should be,” he says. “Postcard beautiful, native grasses, the water, the woods. Do you even know you’re in the city? It’s similar on the other side, only it’s full of bums.” On the west bank, Boogaard says, hidden by trees and in between trailer parks and the river’s edge, is a tent community of homeless men and women.

As if on cue, five apparently homeless men approach us in a threatening manner. Like a pack of wolves, they suddenly split up and surround us. One of the spiky-haired, tattooed male youths apologizes for his “aggressive moves,” before oddly curtseying. A drunk shouts at Boogaard, “Are you straight?” According to Boogaard, he’s alluding to gays who have been known to cruise the local park.

“Never a dull moment on the Jordan,” Boogaard says.

INDIAN SOULS
One of the few areas of the Jordan Boogaard won’t boat is the 300 acres of flood plain bordered by Interstate 215, 2100 North and the Jordan’s west bank in unincorporated Salt Lake County. The river’s fate in that stretch, he says, makes him too sad.

The land is home to several stables where city residents board their horses, a model-airplane airport, an off-highway-vehicle training facility where teens can learn to ride, and a sprawling series of dirt hills and sharp inclines for SLMX’s motocross competition. Trucks ferrying loads of dirt barrel along the road from I-215 toward the development. Apart from the stables and several other private landowners, the rest of the land is state owned.

SLMX’s owner Shane Davis says he has a 10-year lease from the state to run his concession. He has plans to expand the motocross, which bike fanatic Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. has been known to frequent, and build an RV campground.

Julie Fife, who boards her horse at the nearby Hunter Stables, hates the motocross. “They could have built it anywhere,” she says. The deafening noise of up to 80 bikes on the weekend has devastated the ecosystem, Fife says.

Boogaard describes the motocross location as “a poor choice of venues. It just doesn´t mesh well with anything around it—present or future.” He’s referring to Salt Lake City’s plans to build a 180-acre, $40 million regional sports complex on the rest of the site, with up to 20 soccer and six baseball fields, along with extensive parking. However, the state has yet to transfer title of the land to the city.

The motocross land is, Boogaard says, “one of two places we thought were going to be set aside as nature preserve, and now they’re going to be destroyed.” The second is the Galena stretch, lying east of the Jordan River and north of Bangerter Highway, not too terribly far from Draper’s IKEA store.

One of the river corridor’s staunchest defenders is Zach Frankel. He set up the Utah Rivers Council to protect rivers through grass-roots citizen involvement. “Rivers in Utah don’t have a legal right to exist,” he says. “They’re pipes to deliver somebody’s water rights.”

HONEST BROKER
Galena’s future has been consumed by a war of words over alleged conflicts of interest. From November 2008 through March 2009, angry and often vitriolic claims surrounded negotiations between UTA and the Draper City Council. A key point of contention from the river activists’ point of view was that a UTA board member involved in discussions with Draper allegedly did not reveal his financial interest in the proposed development until just before the council approved the project, something the developer hotly denies.

In 2000, former Riverton state Sen. Mont Evans passed a law protecting Galena from development in perpetuity by placing a conservation easement on it. Six years later, Frankel’s wife, Wendy Fisher, who in 1990 set up nonprofit Utah Open Lands, was asked by the Utah Department of Natural Resources (DNR) to prepare the easement.

But the easement was never signed. Frankel blames then-House Speaker Greg Curtis for the delay.

According to Mike Styler, the DNR executive director, Curtis wanted to trade 10 acres of the state-owned Galena property for better road access for his real-estate client Woodside Homes. The private land he offered to trade also included a stretch of the Jordan River Parkway trail.

Styler was interested in the swap so he didn’t sign the easement. Curtis, however, then dropped out of sight. Styler later found out Curtis’ client was no longer interested in the deal. Curtis, who also happens to be subcontracted as a UTA lobbyist, did not respond to City Weekly regarding this story.

Curtis’ inadvertent hogtieing of the project gave the Legislature time to pass House Bill 179, which Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. signed into law in March of 2009. The bill allows the state to potentially swap Galena land with the Woodside Homes property.

This was welcome news for UTA which had been in talks with the Draper City Council since late summer 2008 about locating a FrontRunner stop on the Woodside Homes acreage at 12800 South, close to Interstate 15. Some neighbors, though, complained and wanted the transit stop moved further south to the state-owned DNR property of Galena, according to UTA attorney Bruce Jones.

As Draper City Council began wooing UTA in earnest, among those involved in discussions was Terry Diehl, a real-estate developer and CEO of Wasatch Pacific Inc. Diehl holds another key appointment: He’s a UTA board member and its planning committee chair.

Diehl has a financial stake in Whitewater VII, a developer with the contract to buy the 144-acre Woodside Homes property. But, according to several media accounts, whether Diehl was representing UTA or Whitewater VII during Draper City Council meetings remained a point of confusion for many, including Councilwoman Stephanie Davis. So much so, that during the Nov. 20, 2008, council meeting when the council voted to approve the Whitewater development, Davis asked Diehl to clarify who he was representing when he said “we.” To which he answered Whitewater.

All the same, the confusion surrounding Diehl’s involvement became fodder for several news stories that alleged Diehl, from the beginning, had failed to disclose his financial ties to Whitewater VII.

“That’s an absolute lie,” Diehl says. From Day 1, he says, he told Draper he represented Whitewater. “I never represented UTA in this.” Diehl went so far as to request a letter from Draper City confirming that he’d been an honest broker from the onset, a letter which was sent to the Senate by Mayor Darrell Smith just before a vote on HB 179—the bill that paved the way for the land swap.

But Diehl’s representation of Whitewater wasn’t all that troubled Davis. The city agreed Whitewater VII could have unlimited density and height for its development. Draper also agreed to pay millions of dollars for the land for the transit stop and related infrastructure. That left her, she says, “really uncomfortable,” so she voted not to approve the development on Nov. 20, 2008. Davis was the one holdout on the council.

The first DNR’s Styler knew of UTA being involved in the Galena development was reading a newspaper report that Draper had rezoned Galena for transit-orientated development. Styler says he’s never talked to the Woodside/Whitewater owners, which he describes as “unusual. We’d like to know who the property owners are.”

UTA board member Diehl was present at Styler’s first meeting with the transit authority. “I wasn’t sure if he was there as a developer or as a representative of the developer,” Styler recalls. When he found out later Diehl was on the UTA board, Styler was “somewhat surprised that a representative of the developer was also a board member.” Diehl says, “Maybe Mike Styler wasn’t aware, but he should have been. I’ve never been to any meeting [representing] UTA.”If Styler was uncertain whom Diehl represented, he didn’t fare much better in his dealings with UTA over Galena. “It’s difficult to decide if you’re talking to the property owner, the developers or UTA,” he says. “I thought [UTA attorney Bruce Jones] was representing UTA, but I wondered if he was also representing the property owners.” Jones says all he represents is UTA.

When Frankel confronted UTA counsel Jones at the Legislature about Curtis’ alleged stalling of the easement signing, he says Jones threatened him. “He said I was heading into actionable territory; I could lose my house.” Jones says he made no such threats against Frankel, that rather the river activist promised blood in the streets.

According to Jones, the project is awaiting consensus among all the stakeholders. For now, it’s “up in the air.”

Frankel lambastes UTA for failing to “understand the public’s concern about ethics, corruption and conflicts of interest.” Giving up what he calls “the last jewel of the Jordan” to commercial development is obscene, he says. “If anything is protected around the Jordan, it should be here.”

Envision Utah, however, had little to say, he notes, about the Galena controversy. As soon as the Jordan Blueprint came out, the nonprofit moved onto other projects. “Where’s the advocacy?” Frankel asks. “They turned the other cheek.”

“We’re not an advocacy organization, that’s not our role,” Envision’s Matheson says. “We bring people together and facilitate public discussions.” Advocacy, he adds, would “compromise our mission.”

The Jordan’s salvation may lie with an implementation committee spun out of Blueprint Jordan and chaired by Salt Lake County Councilwoman Jenny Wilson. Wheeler is a committee member. He says the plan is to create a Jordan River Commission to levy property taxes to buy private land for preservation, a plan that nevertheless irks him. Why develop existing state land for projects like the motocross and proposed soccer complex, he asks, and then tax the public to buy more private land?

PILLAR OF SALT
On the other side of the river from where UTA had hopes to erect its train stop and Whitewater VII reportedly proposes its mini-city, construction is already starting on another project: a sewage treatment plant. Jeff Salt knows the plant project well, having battled it through the courts and the press for four years. “Nobody advocates for the Jordan River,” he says.

Salt is a passionate advocate, something that makes him both an asset, and, given his aggressiveness, a liability for his colleagues in the Utah environmental movement who prefer the art of compromise over finger-wagging. One point he makes, though, that everyone agrees on is that, “You need to outline the needs of the river system first. If not, you’ll never get it right.”

Locating the new Jordan Basin water reclamation facility in Riverton, Salt says, “is redundant.” It will process sewage from Herriman and Daybreak, he claims, so logically, “it should be located there.” The plant’s facility manager, Garland Mayne, says it will treat 15 million gallons of sewage a day from the southern end of the valley. It was located by the Jordan River, Mayne says, because it’s a geographical low point in the valley, which aids sewage collection.

On one side of the Jordan, Salt says caustically, you’ll have “a huge industrial facility, on the other side, the city of Oz.”

FIGHTING OVER SCRAPS
One Wednesday afternoon in late May, Boogaard and half a dozen other kayaking enthusiasts meet at 12300 South by the Jordan for their weekly trip down the river. The setting sun streams down through the bullrushes. Canada geese take off in a V-formation against the evening sky. A muskrat pokes his head out of some reeds at the passing voices, the riverbanks cradling the kayakers as the swollen river takes them down to 9800 South. “The river is a place for peace,” Boogaard says. “It’s where I can be myself.”

Abruptly, several brown, five-story office buildings rear up above the 6-foot tall rushes like futuristic monoliths. They tower over the river, harsh reminders of the concrete jungle that, for a few blocks, the boaters have escaped. This is Riverfront Parkway at 10600 South, built in the mid-90s—representing the future, Wheeler fears, for much of the undeveloped remnants of the Jordan.

The kayakers scramble up a muddy riverbank to get out. As several of the boaters struggle out onto the parkway with their boats, waiting patiently in adjacent bushes for the boaters to get out of the way are a family of ducks. Nature, it seems, knows its pecking order on the river.

Boogaard says his ultimate goal “is for the government to work at better management practices with filling in and building on the flood plains.” Water, he says, does what it wants to do. “We need to quit choking the river to death,” he says. “One day the river’s going to demand the space back and it won’t be there.”

Salt doesn’t share Boogaard’s cautious optimism that with residential development comes more homeowners invested in protecting the little wilderness that remains beyond their back yards. “We’re losing the river, just fighting for scraps,” he says. “It’s death by a thousand cuts.”