Conservationist buys Needles Outpost for $2.5M during controversial land auction

Conservationist buys Needles Outpost for $2.5M during controversial land auction

(Courtesy of SITLA)


Save Story
Leer en español

Estimated read time: 5-6 minutes

This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.

SALT LAKE CITY — Conservationist, philanthropist and millionaire Jennifer Speers bought 640 acres of land in Bears Ears National Monument Wednesday after a bidding war with a venture capital company.

The purchased land — known as Needles Outpost — includes a popular camping ground, old landing strip, convenience store and lone gas station. The minimum bid for the area began at $1.03 million and ended when Speers paid $2.5 million for the property and assorted amenities.

The land was part of 1,500 acres being auctioned by the Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration (SITLA) Wednesday, including residential lots in Cedar City and a 480-acre portion of land near Rip Gut Creek in Beaver County.

The agency holds auctions twice a year to sell land they do not deem economically viable to the state. The money from the auction is then deposited into the Permanent School Fund for investment.

SITLA controls certain land deeded to the state in order to support state institutions, including public schools, universities and hospitals. The state government currently owns 10 percent of all Utah land, and SITLA controls 6 percent of that, based on parcels of land allotted by Congress.

*Graphic:* Josh Furlong According to SITLA, the agency auctions 2,600 acres of land annually, generating substantial income for investment, though the auctioned land represents only 0.077 percent of the agency’s trust lands.

Though Needles Outpost was ultimately purchased by conservationist Speers, who does not currently intend to develop on the land, the recent auction generated controversy among conservation groups, including the Wilderness Society.

In response to the auction, the Wilderness Society released a report entitled “Utah Lands on the Chopping Block” that bemoaned the loss of state lands, including those auctioned by SITLA over the years.

“The point of this report is not to say anything bad about SITLA or their mandate, the reason for doing this report … is strictly to help the public understand the difference between state land and public land … and that state land is not public land in any way, shape or form,” said Brad Brooks, director of the Public Lands Campaign for the Wilderness Society.

At statehood, Utah was granted 7.5 million acres of federal (or public) land and has since sold 4.1 million acres of that land. While the federal government currently owns approximately 64 percent of Utah, the state government has pushed in recent years to receive an additional 31.2 million acres of federal land through Utah’s Transfer of Public Lands Act.

“We have heard a certain number of times that if we were just to give public lands to the state, access would be the same and everything would be fine,” Brooks said. “We want folks to understand that that’s actually not the case at all. … Managing agencies, and Utah in particular, maximize profit off their land, which is very different than public lands.”

Once lands are in state possession, the public has no say in how they are used, Brooks said. While public lands are multiple-use lands available for recreation, once the state owns the lands, they can use them in whatever way they deem most economically viable.

Related:

“I would wager that (SITLA is) agnostic on who the buyer is. They are simply selling it for economic reasons and sometimes the buyer might be a conservationist, sometimes it might be a developer, sometimes it might be a gas company,” Brooks said. “For the Needles Outpost sale, I know the buyer there is someone who wants to maintain public access. I think that’s a great outcome, but … it could have easily gone to a developer as well.”

However, though the state has sold 4.1 million acres of the original 7.5 million acres of trust land, much of that was sold in the first 35 years of statehood and is now where the majority of Utahns live, according to SITLA.

“Since SITLA’s inception in 1994, the largest type of land divestiture of state school trust lands has been conservation land exchanges with the federal government, not sales,” SITLA spokesperson Deena Loyola told KSL in a statement, which was later posted to their website.

Since its inception, SITLA has auctioned an estimated 59,686 acres of land and developed approximately 20,000 acres of urban and suburban lands in Washington, Iron, Utah, Summit, Grand, Kane and other counties through its real estate development group. Other land sales bring SITLA’s historic land sales to slightly over 100,000 acres.

“For those lands that were sold, SITLA believes that auctioning lands that do not have significant income potential, and depositing the funds into the Permanent School Fund for investment, is a sound management strategy,” Loyola said.

Related stories

Most recent Utah stories

Related topics

UtahOutdoorsPolitics
Liesl Nielsen

    STAY IN THE KNOW

    Get informative articles and interesting stories delivered to your inbox weekly. Subscribe to the KSL.com Trending 5.
    By subscribing, you acknowledge and agree to KSL.com's Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

    KSL Weather Forecast