When hundreds of St. George residents show up in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon to hear the mayor speak, you know there must be something pressing on their minds.
For some, it’s a worry about the community having enough water. Others said it’s how a growing city could snarl traffic or harm surrounding nature.
Alice Loeffler, who moved here from Pennsylvania two decades ago, said she hoped to hear updates about how the city can slow growth. She left feeling disappointed.
“If they want growth in this city, they've got to have places for people to live, to eat and to work. And we don't have it,” she said. “So they’ve got to stop the growth.”
The fact that local water supplies are already strained, she said, makes it all the more urgent.
“What are we going to do? We can't support the development if we don't have the resources to maintain them.”
Growth and water continue to be two of the top things residents ask about, said Mayor Michele Randall, which is why they remained central themes of this year’s State of the City address — just like the past two years.
She feels confident in the countywide plan to stretch the area’s water supplies over the next 20 years as it continues to grow but acknowledged there’s still plenty of work to do when it comes to changing the way people use water.
“Nothing makes me more angry than if it's raining outside and you go by and somebody’s got a sprinkler on,” Randall said in an interview with KUER prior to the address. “Like, really? Come on, turn the sprinklers off.”
Conservation efforts like the grass replacement rebate, have gotten off to a good start, she said, but more residents and businesses need to sign up for it to make a big enough dent. The city has already replaced a lot of the grass that doesn’t get used on its property, she said, such as switching medians to desert landscaping. And she’s encouraging The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to lead by example, too.
“There's so many chapels in Washington County — especially the older ones — that have a ton of grass, and you will never see anybody on the grass. … So there is a lot that the LDS Church could do that would really help.”
Randall also touted the city’s new initiative to install smart water meters to let residents know how much they’re using.
St. George’s water rates have gone up 30 cents over the past two years, but remain inexpensive — just $1.40 for one thousand gallons, according to the city. Randall said she’d like to keep it that way, if possible, but that depends on how well the city’s conservation efforts work and how many residents get on board.
Shane Hunt already reduced his H20 footprint by installing desert landscaping around his home in neighboring Washington City. He’s glad to see local leaders push conservation and said the community still has great parks for the times residents want to enjoy big grassy spaces.
“Collectively we can enjoy that, as opposed to having what is water-thirsty grass that you're trying to keep alive in what essentially is the desert.”
He hopes the relatively wet weather over the past year doesn’t keep more residents from joining him.
“That's great. But that still shouldn't cause us to step back [from] those efforts to conserve and be smart about what we do.”
He was happy to hear updates about regional conservation efforts at the address but left wishing there was even more emphasis and detail on that. It’d be great, he said, if the city held a whole expo dedicated to water in the future.
Another big issue is the increased road congestion that comes with a local population that has quadrupled since 1990. The area’s rocky topography, however, limits the city’s options for moving people around.
“Not only do we have a freeway, [but] we've got a river, we've got these bluffs to the east, to the west, to the north. And so that makes traffic difficult,” Randall said.
That’s why she supports the Northern Corridor Highway — a long fought-over proposal to build a road north of downtown through part of the Red Cliffs National Conservation Area that’s home to the Mojave desert tortoise. The city is also planning less contentious projects to ease crosstown traffic, such as extending 3000 South to the Southern Parkway near the airport and George Washington Boulevard from the east side of the Southern Parkway to I-15 near the convention center.
Traffic is a top issue for local real estate agent Tina Griffin, too.
“You have to really set aside time in order to travel from one area to another,” she said. “That's a big concern because I'm out working in it all day long, you know, that's my mobile office.”
Unlike building new roads or restricting water use, however, some of the potential solutions to these challenges are outside of the city’s control.
Randall said finding ways to create affordable housing is more complicated, for example, but is equally crucial to turning St. George’s recent boom into a sustainable future.
“If an average home is $500,000, a police officer and a school teacher can’t afford that, a nurse can't afford that. … They need homes, and we don’t have enough.”
The city doesn’t control home prices, she said, but local leaders are exploring how zoning changes could help, such as creating areas that allow new manufactured homes on smaller lots or some higher-density mixed-use developments. She also pointed out that some of the apartment complexes the city has approved are still on hold because developers are waiting for interest rates to come down.
It’s tough on residents or prospective home buyers who have seen prices rise sharply in recent years as the housing supply can’t keep up. Loeffler said the million-dollar homes being built are out of sync with what local jobs can support.
“I couldn't afford to move anywhere today. I mean, I'm stuck in my house. That's it. If I wanted to move and downsize, I couldn't afford to do it.”
Randall said she understands the feelings of residents who want St. George to go back to the way it was decades ago. The city has changed a lot since she moved here in 1978. Back then, she said, there were just two elementary schools — there are now 14 — and two stoplights.
But the tradeoff, she said, was that there were fewer opportunities for kids to stay and make a living here. When her husband had a heart attack in 1997, for instance, he had to travel to Salt Lake City because the local hospital didn’t have cardiac care — a service it now offers.
“You can't just dwell on the negative. … People need to stop and recognize some of the great things that growth has brought.”
