A new road that enhanced the value of Clinton Charles Myers's real estate investments cost U.S. taxpayers $3 million, which came on top of the $2 million in other federal money that built another road that benefited Myers.
Clinton Charles Myers? You may not recognize the name, but Myers, 63, is a contractor from Rancho Cordova, Calif., who has developed land abutting Utah Olympic Park, site of five of the Games' 15 sports. He is only one of the businessmen positioned to profit from the federal tax dollars lavished on the Olympics. Others include:
Myers, or C.C., as he's known, may be the most colorful of the bunch. Standing 6'5" without his ostrich-skin boots on and weighing almost 300 pounds, he became a California folk hero in 1994 when his construction company rebuilt a stretch of the Santa Monica Freeway—heavily damaged by that year's Northridge earthquake—10 weeks ahead of schedule. The feat earned him deification by Rush Limbaugh and a $14.8 million bonus from the state.
In the summer of 1990 Myers took a majority stake in a newly formed partnership called the Summit Ranch Joint Venture, whose goal was to develop a 1,136-acre tract on and adjacent to a mountain at Kimball Junction in Utah. This was no ordinary mountain: Only a few weeks earlier the state had selected it as the site of a winter sports park that would include ski jumps and a bobsled and luge run. The facility would become Utah Olympic Park.
In October 1990, in what was hailed as an act of great generosity, Myers signed an agreement with Utah officials to give 386 acres of his partnership's tract to the Summit County Municipal Building Authority as the site for the sports park. The gift, however, had strings attached. In exchange for the property the Utah Sports Authority, a state agency overseeing construction of Olympic facilities, agreed to build an access road to the sports park that would run through Summit Ranch's remaining 750 acres, opening the area to the development of single-family homes and condos. In addition the sports authority pledged to install "all necessary utilities, including electrical power, natural gas, telephone, water system and sewer," to serve both the sports park and the 700 residences proposed by Myers.
But how to pay for a road for a private developer so that the funding wouldn't look like Olympic money? Or worse, wouldn't be—or even appear to be—state tax dollars? Not to worry. Cash was available from the Utah Permanent Community Impact Fund. The source of the fund's money: the federal government
The U.S. Treasury collects royalties from mining and petroleum companies that prospect and drill on federal lands, and from individuals and businesses that buy and sell the related leases. The Treasury returns half the payments to the states where the lands are located. States generally distribute the money as grants or loans to those communities that have been socially or economically affected by prospecting or drilling. In Utah this money traditionally has gone to struggling counties to help with public needs, like purchasing a fire truck.
Now the state was going to give $2 million in federal royalties to Summit County—by far the state's richest county, and one in which a majority of the mines closed years ago—and the money would be in the form of an outright grant rather than a loan, even though the fund's rules state that grants can be made "only when the other financing mechanisms cannot be utilized, where no reasonable method of repayment can be identified, or in emergency situations regarding public health and/or safety." On top of that the grant was earmarked for construction of a road that would benefit a private developer.
The state's Olympic partisans seemingly sensed the danger for negative publicity if there was a paper trail from the grant to Myers's road. To avoid that pitfall, Utah's finance division, with the agreement of Summit County officials, dumped the $2 million into a pool of other state money that was to be used to build the winter sports park. Now the grant dollars were no longer traceable—even if the intent remained firmly on the record. Furthermore, there would be no annoying breakdown of how the money was spent. In an internal memo state finance director Gordon Crabtree wrote, "Since the $2 million grant will be pooled with these other revenue sources, budgeted expenditures for the grant are not applicable."
One obstacle remained to the speedy construction of the two-mile access road, to be known as Bear Hollow Drive. If the Utah Department of Transportation, the state agency responsible for highway construction, handled the job, it could insist on building the road to meet both county and state standards, a costly requirement. Again, not to worry. The Olympics make all things possible.
The Utah Sports Authority assigned responsibility to the state's Division of Facilities Construction & Management, an agency that builds buildings, not highways. The result might have been anticipated: a winding, two-lane road with grades exceeding county standards and prone to slides and sinkholes.
The road paid off handsomely for Myers and his partners. County assessment records show that in 1990 the Summit Ranch land was valued for tax purposes at about $3 million. Ten years later the land alone—excluding the houses that had been built—was valued at $48 million, a sixteenfold increase. In the last year sale prices for homes in the partnership's development, known as Sun Peak, have ranged between $320,000 and $1.5 million.
A spokeswoman for Myers, Linda Clifford, a C.C. Myers Inc. executive who managed the project, told SI that "whatever the assessed value is now, it's because homes have been built there. People have bought lots and built homes, and that's why there's an assessed value of [$48 million]."
As for Bear Hollow Drive, Clifford said, "The only reason that there was a road on the property was that [we gave] the property to the state at no charge. For nothing. Zero. So it could put the jumps and the bob and luge and everything in there, and the state owns that property now and has been using it for quite some time, and it is a public attraction."
The value of Summit Ranch development was further enhanced in 1999, when a second access road was built into Utah Olympic Park. This three-mile stretch cost U.S. taxpayers $3 million. The second road will benefit not only Myers, in part by diverting sports-park traffic around his development, but also the most powerful organization in Utah: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The church's real estate arm, Property Reserve Inc. (PRI), owns 430 prime acres through which the road runs, a tract long coveted by developers for its gorgeous mountain backdrop (which now includes the ski jumps) and its proximity to Park City (10 minutes) and other nearby resorts.
Shortly after the asphalt was laid for this road, PRI presented plans to Summit County authorities for an ambitious development: 994 single-family homes and town houses, nearly one million square feet of commercial space, an office campus and a town center with its own main street, school and library. No one knows how soon construction will begin. The one certainty is the role of the federally built road. It is the spine of the development, the feeder from which everything else flows.
Utah has used $13 million in federal money to rebuild the Kimball Junction exit off I-80. The reconstruction has come complete with artwork. Colorful bas-reliefs on the walls of the underpass, depicting various winter sporting events, pay homage to the Olympics. Unfortunately, except for the occasional motorist who stops to change a tire, few will get to appreciate the murals. It's hard to study them while whizzing by at 65 mph.
More significant, while the revamped interchange should ease congestion during the Games—Utah Olympic Park is less than a mile from the exit—in the long term it will facilitate travel to Park City, Deer Valley and other resorts and developments, among them Myers's, the Mormon Church's and one backed by Norman Bangerter, a former governor. Park City and Deer Valley are both enthusiastic about the federally funded roadwork.
Says a spokeswoman for Deer Valley, "It helps with the locals coming up from Salt Lake and destination skiers coming in from the airport. [The interchange] makes it a lot easier to get to our resort. Everything [all the work going on to prepare the state for the Olympics] has been positive. Not only for the local investment, but also because it gets our name out and people see what an amazing resort Deer Valley is."
Echoes a spokeswoman for Park City, "We're hoping to ride the coattails of the Olympics. It's publicity we've dreamed of. We're only 35 minutes from this airport that has benefited from federal money."
Deer Valley, which Stern began developing in 1981 on the site of a onetime mining camp, has seen its reputation soar on the eve of the 2002 Olympics. This year a Ski magazine survey named it North America's top resort, displacing perennial titleholder Vail. The magazine noted that Deer Valley has "snow like brushed velvet and food fit for a royal court" and boasts one employee for every three visitors.
Park City owner Cumming did not enter the ski-resort business until seven years ago, when Salt Lake City was 14 months from winning the 2002 hosting rights. He had worked hard to help the city land those rights. Cumming, who is chairman of Leucadia National Corp., a publicly traded holding company with interests in insurance, banking, mining, real estate and winery operations, was chairman of the Utah Sports Authority in 1990 when that agency cut its deal with Myers for the Sun Peak land-road exchange. The agreement paved the way for construction of the ski jumps and the luge and bobsled track to help persuade the IOC to award Salt Lake the Winter Games.
In April 1994, with facilities under construction at Kimball Junction and the IOC's site selection looming, Cumming purchased control of the Park City Mountain Resort and a ski resort in California for $42 million from Nick Badami, a SLOC trustee. Cumming folded the properties into a new company called Powdr Corp., the ownership of which he handed over to his sons, John and David.
