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Loading...Tooele County is proposing to raise property taxes and the hounds are on the loose, out for blood.
A favorite punching bag seems to be the Deseret Peak Complex because in 2011 the county reportedly spent $2.1 million operating the complex and took in $464,335 from it. You do the math. It almost makes my impulse purchases at Walmart that push me over budget seem paltry in comparison.
Never mind that if we stop paying for this complex, our dearth of recreation here will be even dearthier.
Who needs baseball diamonds, an outdoor swimming pool, and a convention center anyway? Plus, the DP Complex seems awfully fixated on our horse heritage, putting on rodeos and all that. Who even does horses anymore, when they are so yesterday. I propose, instead of this old-fashioned, passé tradition of horses and ranching that dates back to the 1800s, we should do the following instead:
We can build a subterranean city called Bunkerville. Tourists could pay us to stay in underground penthouses with viewing portholes for gophers and voles. In the west part of Grantsville, where the water table is so high, we could go one step further and construct submarines, just in case. This not only will serve as a tourist magnet, it can play double-duty as bunkers now that the Emergency Management Services department is gone. Motto: Because sunshine is overrated.
Why should Park City have all the fun? Just because they have snow, snow and more snow, plus the foresight to build a city around a common vision where even their manhole covers are made of lodgepole pine, doesn’t mean we can’t duplicate their success. In conjunction with Magna, we should construct the biggest tailpipe snowboarding pit over the copper mine. Motto: Greatest snowboarding on earth.
So maybe we are too gung-ho over horses — enough of that. But country music isn’t too bad, is it? Then why not establish our county as the Nashville of the West? With our drawl, all we need is music. And some well-known names. Why, Keith Urban can kick it off. He’ll do it as payback because we launched his career at the Tooele County Fair so many years ago. Motto: The Nashville Outback.
Have you heard that Venice, Italy, is crumbling? Someone had that brilliant idea long ago to submerge their streets and raise their young men to be gondoliers. I can’t even imagine the water traffic on Valentine’s Day. Well, we have an opportunity here to take their place when their city finally succumbs to mold. Let’s just extend the lake in Stansbury into the outlying areas, and we’ll be good. My husband won’t mind commuting to Salt Lake City in a motorboat. Motto: Best watering hole in the West.
And speaking of Salt Lake City, why not extend a boardwalk all the way to Tooele County? And high rise hotels along the way? If Honolulu can do it, why can’t we? Just walking the entire boardwalk length will certainly fix our county’s obesity problem. But the best thing is we can build a restaurant industry around brine shrimp. Brine shrimp burritos, brine shrimp pancakes, brine shrimp shakes. I can already imagine the lines out the door and all the way down to the Salt Flats. Motto: Bigger doesn’t mean better.
There you have it. So much better, don’t you think?
Jewel Punzalan Allen is a memoir writing coach and a long-time journalist. She blogs at pink-ink-pink.blogspot.com.
