Holding, though, had something going for him more potent than precedent. He had access. In addition to helpful lawmakers Holding got an assist from elsewhere in Washington, from a leading Forest Service officer, Gray Reynolds. A former chief forester in Utah, Reynolds, a deputy director of the Forest Service, took on the task of drafting crucial sections of the legislation.
On Nov. 12, 1996, President Clinton signed the Omnibus Parks and Public Lands Management Act expanding national parks and safeguarding other natural resources, a move the President said would "put nature within reach of millions of families." Clinton pointed to the Presidio in San Francisco, Sterling Forest on the New York-New Jersey border and the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve in Kansas as lands to be preserved or restored. Clinton made no mention of section 304 of the act, which ordered the Forest Service to carry out the Snowbasin land exchange "without delay." After a decade Earl Holding finally had the land for his future development—courtesy of the Olympics.
Four months later, in February 1997, Reynolds retired from the Forest Service, and shortly thereafter he went to work for Holding as general manager of Snowbasin. His job was to develop the resort that had been made possible by the land-exchange bill he had helped draft. Upon hiring Reynolds, Holding made one of his rare public comments, saying of his new general manager, "He's a bright, intelligent, well-educated man. He'll really fit our outfit extremely well."
The 1,378 acres Holding received—the area had grown slightly—has glorious views of both mountains and valleys. It is marked by great stands of fir, rugged outcroppings and myriad trails that wind through trees, past ponds and onto bluffs overlooking the bucolic farm valley below. Here will eventually rise luxury homes, lodges, restaurants, riding trails, a golf course and who knows what else. No doubt the world attention that will be showered on Snowbasin during the Olympics will do much to enhance its value.
The federal legislation required Holding to trade land "of approximate equal value" for this choice piece of real estate. On the surface it might appear that the U.S. government got the better deal, because it acquired 11,757 acres from Holding. Taxpayers got 8.5 acres for every one acre they gave up. However, a close inspection of the land tells another story.
Let's start with Jebo Creek, one of the 21 properties in northern Utah that Holding transferred to the Forest Service. It's a 1,920-acre parcel in one of the state's remotest corners, the high plains country some 100 miles northeast of Salt Lake City, near the Idaho border. While the land around Snowbasin has long been popular with outdoorsmen from nearby Ogden, Jebo Creek draws a different crowd—cattle.
Stuart Wamsley, whose wife's family owned the land for decades before selling to Holding, says the Forest Service now owns prime grazing property. Wamsley describes it as a "right beautiful piece of land." We'll have to take his word for it. The place is so isolated, there's not a paved road into it. Although ownership changed, nothing much else did. Cattle still graze there, as they have for years, now as guests of federal taxpayers.
Many of the other parcels are similarly remote. A 2,800-acre tract in Cache County is at elevations of about 9,000 feet and can be reached only by what the federal appraiser who valued the land called "unimproved trail roads." To visit another parcel in the same county, Providence Canyon, you must take a dirt road. When you get to the property—let the appraiser describe it: "This parcel, a former stone quarry, takes up the canyon bottom and both sides of the canyon.... There is not much vegetation on the parcel because of its former quarry use."
As difficult to reach as those areas are, at least you can get to them. Six parcels totaling 1,164 acres that Holding traded to the government "have no physical access," according to the federal appraisal. This is a far cry from the kind of land that Senator Hatch described to his colleagues in 1995 when he urged them to approve the exchange. "This land," said Hatch of the parcels Holding intended to trade, "possesses outstanding recreational, wildlife, mountain and access values for public use and enjoyment."
So for the land at Snowbasin that was within an hour's drive of half of Utah's population, Holding swapped land that most Utahans will never see. "What they did was trade land that could be used by people for land that can be used by animals," says Wes Odell, a Utah resident who was active in an environmental group that tried to block the land swap. One of the few properties Holding gave up that is readily accessible to people is an 847-acre tract in Ogden called Taylor Canyon, located on the other side of the mountain from Snowbasin.
Not surprisingly, the land Holding traded was of much lower value per acre than what he received. The 21 parcels he gave up had an average value of $363 an acre. The real estate tax bills on some are so low they read like a computer error: $5.25 on one 40-acre parcel last year, for example. By contrast, the Forest Service land Holding obtained was valued at $3,000 per acre. In one final touch the federal appraisal put the overall value of the land Holding exchanged at slightly more than the land he received. No problem: The Forest Service wired Holding $135,600 to cover the difference.
Holding wasn't through in Washington yet. Now that he had the Forest Service land, he looked to taxpayers to build a $15 million road through it to his ski resort. Holding had promised to pay for this road himself. In the 1980s, when Utah planned a new highway into the Ogden Valley, Holding asked the state to build it nearer Snowbasin. In return he promised to put in an access road to the ski slopes to supplement the lone existing road, a serpentine thriller completed in 1940.
The task of routing the Trappers Loop Highway (State Highway 167) closer to Snowbasin proved both challenging and costly. It's one thing to build a highway in a valley (the original plan); another to carve it out of the shifting sides of a mountain (what Holding wanted). Once the land exchange cleared Congress, a way opened for Holding to get out of his pledge to build the access road: the Olympics.
In September 1997 Bennett stitched an amendment into a Senate appropriations bill giving the Forest Service $800,000 to design the access road. Bennett said it was crucial for Utah to meet Olympic security criteria. "The safety of the athletes and the spectators will be greatly enhanced with the relief provided by this new access," said Bennett. Warning that time was running out, he said, "It is important this work commence immediately." Bennett failed to mention that the road would shave a half hour or more off the driving time between the Salt Lake airport and Holding's future resort.
By early 1998 it was dawning on folks in Utah, where newspapers had written extensively about the Snowbasin controversy, that federal taxpayers might have to foot the bill for the entire road, not only its design. To make sure Utah taxpayers weren't stuck with any part of the cost, a state legislative committee adopted a resolution barring the use of state funds for that purpose. By then Utah politicians and Olympic boosters were mounting an all-out lobbying effort for a federal appropriation. The Utah congressional delegation signed on. SLOC pushed for federal help in the press and in the halls of Congress. When Bennett visited the Winter Olympics in Nagano in February 1998, he pointed to the traffic jams on the way to the downhill venue to underscore the need for a new access road to Snowbasin. When he returned to Washington, he asked Congress to appropriate $10 million to $15 million for the road. "If we don't get that this year," he threatened, "we might as well hold the downhill in Colorado."
Again Bennett and his band of Utah lawmakers delivered—at the expense of taxpayers everywhere else. Legislation provided the money for the Forest Service to pay for the road, not the U.S. Transportation Department, which is responsible for highway building and appropriations. What's the difference? A road built with Transportation Department funds would have required the expenditure of some Utah state money. No such matching was necessary if the Forest Service built it.
Together, Bennett's bill and the land-exchange act exempted Holding from having to come up with an environmental impact statement on the initial phase of his Snowbasin development, which included the building of the access road. Such a statement could have delayed construction until after the Olympics. Utah environmentalists were especially concerned about the waiver because the road was laid out in an area susceptible to slides.
The $15 million road is something of an engineering marvel. It runs a mere 3.5 miles, but it required all the skills of highway builders to conquer the challenging terrain to reach Snowbasin. To this scenic byway in February 2002 will come thousands from all over the world to make their way to the mountain. And for six days they will watch the world's best skiers vie for the gold. Then they will go home.
As it has turned out, the road may cost taxpayers a lot more. That's because in April the fears of environmentalists proved to be well-founded. Shifting soil caused the pavement to break apart, creating large gaps, and the Utah Department of Transportation had to close the road for three weeks for repairs and install a new drainage system. Whether the road will require maintenance every spring, when it's most vulnerable to slides, remains to be seen. As for Holding, he's free to do what he's sought to do for 15 years—develop Snowbasin into a posh resort.
Holding, to be sure, offers a different version of these events. Clint Ensign, Sinclair Oil's vice president for government relations and a spokesman for Holding, concedes that the coming of the Olympics expedited the land exchange his boss had sought. Ensign says, however, that Games organizers and politicians were the driving force behind the exchange. "Civic leaders and the Olympic people came to Mr. Holding and said the only place we can hold the Olympic [downhill] is at Snowbasin," he says, pointing out that that group and Holding's oil company mounted the lobbying campaign in Washington.
As for the access road, Ensign acknowledges that Holding had agreed to pay for it in the 1980s, but by the time the land exchange was approved, "circumstances [had] changed significantly." In addition to letting SLOC use Snowbasin for the Games, Holding was urged to make substantial improvements at Snowbasin. "The city also encouraged him to build a hotel in Salt Lake to accommodate the visitors who would come in," says Ensign. "So he was being asked for a lot. And he talked about that with the civic leaders, and he felt [the access road] was no longer his responsibility."
Over the last few years Holding has transformed a 10-acre plot into the hotel that civic leaders had asked him to build for the Olympics. His 24-story Grand America Hotel, which opened last spring, is the first Utah hotel to aspire to five-star status. The white granite tower has 775 rooms, including 395 suites, and a wealth of amenities. "Garden suites provide private balconies overlooking lovely landscaped terraces and a sparkling swimming pool," according to its website. "Opulent suites feature welcoming foyers, graceful French doors leading to the bedroom and imported marble bathrooms." Suites start at $365 and go up to $3,500 a night for the penthouse.
Don't bother trying to book rooms at the Grand America for the Olympics next February. The hotel is sold out--to corporate sponsors, VIPs and the official broadcaster of the Games, NBC, for whom it will serve as headquarters.
Holding has not revealed the cost of the Grand America, though estimates range up to $200 million. Whatever the figure, the quiet word around Salt Lake is that Robert Earl Holding paid for it all--in cash.
You would think that documenting the spending of federal tax dollars in support of the Salt Lake Olympics would be as easy as adding up your paycheck stubs to calculate your annual income. But you would be wrong.
Governments at the federal, state and local levels have different accounting systems. No federal agency or official is responsible for monitoring the Olympic-related spending in Washington, and few people in either the nation's capital or Salt Lake City can even agree on how to define such spending. SI arrived at its $1.5 billion estimate by analyzing figures from Congress's General Accounting Office (GAO), the White House's Office of Management and Budget, various federal and Utah state agencies, the Utah Olympic Officer (the state's liaison with Games organizers) and other sources. SI's total includes all the federal dollars scored by Salt Lake Olympic boosters and Utah politicians for projects that the boosters and politicians themselves described as crucial to the Games.
SLOC president Mitt Romney (above) strongly disputes SI's estimate. "That's way wrong," he says of the $1.5 billion figure. "You're completely off.... Your article is striking me as an entirely bogus piece. Why do you want to do that?"
