Provo MSA Development Thread

[i-215]

I got torn apart last year when I said Evermore Park was just a crazy pipe dream that would never get built.

So now it's gone from an "idea with land," to just an "idea."

Yeah. That doesn't bode well.

[delts145]

Knowing Ken, the Evermore Park will take on an added element of Virtual Entertainment, hence the delay. The old piece of land couldn't accommodate the expanded vision. If the Virtual Entertainment plans meet expectations, then it will be incorporated into Evermore. Could be that Evermore and Void will share the same campus?

[delts145]

Northwest Utah County cities outpace Orem and Provo on growth

Cathy Allred, Daily Herald

http://www.heraldextra.com/news/local/no...ecc912d-2ee2-586e-a94b-0c6c9b649726.html

A trio of northwest Utah County cities are on track to pass the populations of Orem and Provo in 2050 by more than 52,000 people.

“Orem and Provo have a limited supply of buildable land available, so much of their future growth will occur with infill and redevelopment projects,” said Steve Mumford, Eagle Mountain planning director.

In other words, if Orem and Provo hope to keep pace with their neighbors to the north, they will need to build up rather than build out, and soon.

Owen Jackson, public relations and economic development manager for Saratoga Springs, said the growth in his city, as well as in Eagle Mountain and Lehi, helps Utah County and the state as a whole.

Other city administrators agreed.

“A rising tide lifts all ships, and we are excited about the growth in north Utah County,” said Robert Ranc, assistant to the city administrator for Lehi.

For many years, American Fork (population estimate 28,000), Lehi (54,000) and Pleasant Grove (36,000) were called the Tri-Cities area. The use of that term is changing.

With the growth explosion in the new millennium, the term “tri-cities,” when now used in reference to north Utah County, refers to the northwest powerhouse of growth.

“Eagle Mountain, Saratoga Springs and Lehi are the new epicenter of growth along the Wasatch Front, and will most definitely be a center of employment, residential growth, entertainment and shopping in the coming future,” Mumford said...Read More - http://www.heraldextra.com/news/local/no...ecc912d-2ee2-586e-a94b-0c6c9b649726.html



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[delts145]

ZYTO breaks ground for new international headquarters in Utah

http://www.heraldextra.com/business/loca...189e018-633e-5880-931a-fdfac93678da.html



ZYTO Corp, a rapidly growing biocommunication tech company in Utah, broke ground on a new international headquarters building June 16. The office complex will be located at 1172 West 700 North in Lindon. The new, innovative headquarters will house approximately 350 employees, a gym, clinic, and the ZYTO Café featuring an exclusive gluten free menu open to the public.

ZYTO, recently named one of the Salt Lake Tribune's Top Workplaces in Utah, currently has more than 70 employees and is preparing for continued growth and expansion into the global market. The new headquarters will help further these goals as ZYTO continues to expand employment opportunities for local, skilled professionals.

"This construction represents a significant milestone in the growth and expansion of ZYTO. We are pleased to be a part of the Utah County community," said Vaughn R Cook, CEO.

ZYTO is a global technology company that develops and produces software and integrated hardware products that have been specifically designed to provide insight into personal health and wellness decisions.












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[i-215]

Too good to be true? There's reason to believe that an overpass at University Parkway and State Street near the mall may happen sooner than later.

http://www.roadguyrob.com/future-of-university-parkway-in-orem-utah/

[goldcntry]

Nice stand-in of the Bangerter/7800 So bridge...

[i-215]

Thanks. Was the closest guess as to what it might look like.

[s.p.hansen]

Lehi's Tech Company [Adobe] Say Utah Owes It Better Highway, train line

Lehi and its high-tech firms want to jump to the front of the line for transportation projects, arguing the state is reneging on promised work used to lure companies there.

They warn that Utah will lose many new, big employers without improvements.

At issue: a $450 million upgrade to the Interstate 15 corridor through Lehi, including rebuilding a congested interchange with State Road 92 at Thanksgiving Point and adding a "flyover" bridge nearby to improve access across the freeway.

The Utah Transportation Commission, which prioritizes highway projects statewide, currently has that work slated to occur in about five years.

Lehi, developers and their local legislators are urging state lawmakers to start the project next year instead — and borrow the money via bonding if necessary. Otherwise, they say, some major high-tech companies won't come to its "silicon slopes," while congestion forces others to delay expansion.

"We don't want 'silicon slopes' to become 'silicon slow,' " Nathan Ricks, managing partner of Thanksgiving Park Development, told the Legislature's Transportation Interim Committee.

That committee — co-chaired by Sen. Al Jackson, R-Highland — heard arguments this week that the state made and broke promises to improve transportation to attract big companies such as Adobe. State officials deny that.

—

Promises, promises? • As an example, Rep. Jacob Anderegg, R-Lehi, said, "Part of the incentive package that was put together for Adobe included the commitment that the TRAX lines would be completed to their front door sometime around 2018."

The Utah Transit Authority has plans to extend light rail to Adobe someday, but not that soon. Anderegg said Utah economic officials similarly pledged to upgrade the freeway sooner than is now planned.

He said Adobe officials "put off the second phase of their construction, bringing an additional 800 to 1,400 jobs to Utah because of the perception of a failure" to keep promises.

Anderegg and Lehi Mayor Bert Wilson said they know of two Fortune 50 companies that looked at coming to Lehi, but are now stepping back.

"It is quite literally because they have had discussions with Adobe," Anderegg said, "and they have had conversations with a few others" who say transportation commitments were broken.

Salt Lake Tribune
http://www.sltrib.com/news/2738453-155/lehis-high-tech-company-says-utah-owes

[s.p.hansen]

I love this story for 2 reasons:

1. It shows the hypocrisy of Adobe.

We have tech companies like Amazon reinvesting in major cities like downtown Seattle (an entire new amazon corporate office campus in 3 skyscrapers) or San Francisco, even downtown Salt Lake City (on a small scale). You even have companies like Overstock building their new corporate hq next to trax in Salt Lake County, so you know, they can be close to Trax.

Adobe chose Lehi so they could pay their people a little less if they wanted to. They went the least expensive route and they want the highest level of public investment. News flash Adobe, that level of investment is already in Salt Lake a County, you made your choice!

2. This is a wake up call to the tax payers and leaders of Utah County. If you want to stay the job engine of the state, you'd better make investments to retain that edge. Your days of bitching about big government for a few more cents spent on transit and transportation infrastructure needed to be over when you got Adobe a few years ago.

[Makid]

Originally Posted by s.p.hansen

2. This is a wake up call to the tax payers and leaders of Utah County. If you want to stay the job engine of the state, you'd better make investments to retain that edge. Your days of bitching about big government for a few more cents spent on transit and transportation infrastructure needed to be over when you got Adobe a few years ago.

Utah County is only now up to .55% tax for transit. They can add another.2% I think before they are maxed, not counting the additional .25% that the state allowed this past session.

They could match SL County for funding transit if they wanted. This would increase revenue enough to provide better bus service as well as move Trax to Lehi from 2030/2035 to 2020/2025.

If they want to start construction by 2018, they will need to get started on the EIS for the Utah County portion of the line by the end of this year. SL County side is already complete.

Frontrunner enhancements will help more in the short term than Trax will with transit in the area.

All companies there should get together and work with UTA to offer a shuttle service from the Frontrunner station to the various offices. Run it all day from 5:30/6:00 am until 10:30/11:00pm.

This shuttle would be on top of the services that are already in the area. Hours could possible be expanded if the companies or Lehi wanted to invest further.

[Wasatch_One]

Originally Posted by s.p.hansen

I love this story for 2 reasons:

1. It shows the hypocrisy of Adobe.

We have tech companies like Amazon reinvesting in major cities like downtown Seattle (an entire new amazon corporate office campus in 3 skyscrapers) or San Francisco, even downtown Salt Lake City (on a small scale). You even have companies like Overstock building their new corporate hq next to trax in Salt Lake County, so you know, they can be close to Trax.

Adobe chose Lehi so they could pay their people a little less if they wanted to. They went the least expensive route and they want the highest level of public investment. News flash Adobe, that level of investment is already in Salt Lake a County, you made your choice!

2. This is a wake up call to the tax payers and leaders of Utah County. If you want to stay the job engine of the state, you'd better make investments to retain that edge. Your days of bitching about big government for a few more cents spent on transit and transportation infrastructure needed to be over when you got Adobe a few years ago.

You're actually wrong on most of this. I worked for Adobe/Omniture from 2007-2014 so I am pretty aware of the reasoning behind the placement of the campus. The decision was made because roughly 2/3 of the employees at the time were in Utah County and SL County/everywhere else made up about 35-40%.

Adobe obviously wanted to tap into the SL metro employee pool, but stayed loyal to their existing employee base at the time. They also wanted to be between the two main higher education areas in the state. It had nothing to do with paying people less. To Adobe, anywhere in Utah is cheap compared to their HQ in San Jose. And I would venture to say that the Thanksgiving Point area probably is equally if not better paid than most anywhere in SL County. When I left about a year ago, I would guess the employee count was probably closer to 50/50 Utah County/SL County and that is probably what Adobe wanted when they planned the location.

Also, I do remember during the planning stages back in 2010-11 that the facilities teams mentioning the close proximity (immediately east of the campus) to the future TRAX stop via the Draper extension. so I am guessing that was part of the package. There are also continual UTA busses that Adobe has contracted to pick up and drop off people at the frontrunner station during the morning and afternoon, so current and future transit option also played heavily into the location planning.

[jtrent77]

Originally Posted by Wasatch_One

You're actually wrong on most of this. I worked for Adobe/Omniture from 2007-2014 so I am pretty aware of the reasoning behind the placement of the campus. The decision was made because roughly 2/3 of the employees at the time were in Utah County and SL County/everywhere else made up about 35-40%.

Adobe obviously wanted to tap into the SL metro employee pool, but stayed loyal to their existing employee base at the time. They also wanted to be between the two main higher education areas in the state. It had nothing to do with paying people less. To Adobe, anywhere in Utah is cheap compared to their HQ in San Jose. And I would venture to say that the Thanksgiving Point area probably is equally if not better paid than most anywhere in SL County. When I left about a year ago, I would guess the employee count was probably closer to 50/50 Utah County/SL County and that is probably what Adobe wanted when they planned the location.

Also, I do remember during the planning stages back in 2010-11 that the facilities teams mentioning the close proximity (immediately east of the campus) to the future TRAX stop via the Draper extension. so I am guessing that was part of the package. There are also continual UTA busses that Adobe has contracted to pick up and drop off people at the frontrunner station during the morning and afternoon, so current and future transit option also played heavily into the location planning.

You must be wrong about this, as the forummers here always know all the details before jumping to hasty conclusions.

[Wasatch_One]

Originally Posted by jtrent77

You must be wrong about this, as the forummers here always know all the details before jumping to hasty conclusions.

haha, we're all know-it-alls here.

[Future Mayor]

While I can understand the reasoning of trying to be loyal to the Omniture routes and locating conveniently to those people and the existing employees, it seems a bit short sighted to me.

Yes a large number of employees when the were planning on building the new Adobe campus where in Utah County, but things change rapidly. Wasatch has left, my Brother in Law has left, also was with Omniture at the time of the acquisition, and many other have probably left as well. Yes it's warm and fuzzy to locate nearby, but who cares, the founder and CEO of Omniture at the time of acquisition lived in Davis County. With a name like Adobe people will come to you, and being in a downtown would have actually made them getting to you that much easier.

Short sighted, planning on their part, shouldn't be the States problem. Yes there are plans for Trax expansion from Draper, but funding changes and plans change. So rather than be short sighted, and build in hopes of things to come, build where services already exist.

[Wasatch_One]

Originally Posted by Future Mayor

the founder and CEO of Omniture at the time of acquisition lived in Davis County.

Actually both co-founders lived in Provo at the time... same neighborhood even.

[s.p.hansen]

Originally Posted by Wasatch_One

You're actually wrong on most of this. I worked for Adobe/Omniture from 2007-2014 so I am pretty aware of the reasoning behind the placement of the campus. The decision was made because roughly 2/3 of the employees at the time were in Utah County and SL County/everywhere else made up about 35-40%.

Adobe obviously wanted to tap into the SL metro employee pool, but stayed loyal to their existing employee base at the time. They also wanted to be between the two main higher education areas in the state. It had nothing to do with paying people less. To Adobe, anywhere in Utah is cheap compared to their HQ in San Jose. And I would venture to say that the Thanksgiving Point area probably is equally if not better paid than most anywhere in SL County. When I left about a year ago, I would guess the employee count was probably closer to 50/50 Utah County/SL County and that is probably what Adobe wanted when they planned the location.

Also, I do remember during the planning stages back in 2010-11 that the facilities teams mentioning the close proximity (immediately east of the campus) to the future TRAX stop via the Draper extension. so I am guessing that was part of the package. There are also continual UTA busses that Adobe has contracted to pick up and drop off people at the frontrunner station during the morning and afternoon, so current and future transit option also played heavily into the location planning.

While your insider point of view is fun, it doesn't change the fact that you're lazy on the legal side of it. Google GOED tax incentives. Adobe agreed to create 927 jobs by 2030 and those jobs have to pay at least 125% above the county average. This is worth a 40 million dollar tax credit. This was the agreement. Adobe chose Lehi because the county average wage is lower than salt lake county. Sorry but Adobe looks really silly after this article.

[wrendog]

Was back in Utah for the first time in a year and was surprised at all the new construction in Lehi/Thanksgiving Point area. Even some buildings taller than the usual 4-5 stories.

[Wasatch_One]

Originally Posted by s.p.hansen

While your insider point of view is fun, it doesn't change the fact that you're lazy on the legal side of it. Google GOED tax incentives. Adobe agreed to create 927 jobs by 2030 and those jobs have to pay at least 125% above the county average. This is worth a 40 million dollar tax credit. This was the agreement. Adobe chose Lehi because the county average wage is lower than salt lake county. Sorry but Adobe looks really silly after this article.

I think the only one lazy here was the individual that threw out a ton of speculative (mis)points which were proven incorrect, and responded in a defensive tone... Who looks silly now?

I really don't know what point you were trying to make with your last comment but it's apparent you don't know all that much about the situation so let me "learn you" some of the facts.

I am fully aware of the tax incentives that were provided to Adobe and pretty much every other business looking to expand and create jobs in the state. Adobe completed phase 1 of its Lehi campus in 2012 with two future phases to come. The current building was near capacity when I left last summer at roughly 900-1K employees. Phase 2 & 3 will nearly triple the square footage and each phase, I was told, will add about 800 jobs each for a buildout of ~2500.

Because of the large potential employee base, transportation was a big part of the incentive negotiation and I think it actually shocked some people at the time of the announcement that the campus was "that far north" of the then Orem HQ and they would need to commute. We were hearing at the time that it basically came down to two locations... Draper, just around the Point of the Mtn, or Lehi. I honestly thought it was going to be in Draper and was actually a bit surprised it ended up in Lehi.

125% of the county average is probably in the $65-$70K/yr. range. I don't know of many people that make less than that there other than college interns and potentially some contracted, non-Adobe employees working at the facility, with many of the Adobe workers making 2, 3, 400%+ the county average. It would be interesting to better understand how the state calculates this requirement if it's more of an average across all jobs or a median point or something.

Anyway, since relocating there, I would guess they have already created ~200 additional positions so they're well on their way (being three years in out of the 28 year timeframe required by the incentive) to meeting the goal.

[Wasatch_One]

Originally Posted by wrendog

Was back in Utah for the first time in a year and was surprised at all the new construction in Lehi/Thanksgiving Point area. Even some buildings taller than the usual 4-5 stories.

I drive by it probably once a day and it pretty much blows my mind every time I do seeing all the office space. It sounds pretty unreal that more office sq. footage is currently being constructed at Thxgiving Poing than all of SL County combined!

Side note, did you all hear that Vivint Solar (now separate from Vivint since going public) was just acquired by SunEdison yesterday for $2.2B... their stock went up something like 44% yesterday alone. I wonder what that means for their current HQ under construction south of the Megaplex theatre at Thxgiving Pt.

[airhero]

While development in Lehi is great, I don't understand the praise for all the buildings going up. How is Lehi any different from the Sandy office parks that are always getting harped on? There's no logical street layout. Every finished building (apart from Adobe's) is plain or unattractive and surrounded by parking lots, and the renderings I've seen for these new buildings don't impress. It's just another Sandy, but with tech companies.