Utah State News Service

By Matilyn Mortensen Rezoning land in the Cliffside area of Logan will encourage housing stability, city leaders believe, but likely will also contribute to urban sprawl in Cache Valley. The city council voted Tuesday to rezone approximately 65 acres of land in Logan, shifting lot sizes from six houses per acre to four houses per acre. Russ Holley, the Logan city senior planner, said the rezone is “not a big deal” because both designations are for single family homes. “It’s not like you’re going from residential to commercial, or residential to industrial,” Holley said. “Those kinds of drastic zone changes tend to be very impactful. This is a very minimal change.” The intent of the rezoning is so future development will match already existing neighborhoods. The Cliffside area was zoned for higher density a few years ago as part of the Envision Cache County plan. The goal of the plan is to “keep the city, city and the country, country.” This means preventing urban sprawl to...

By   Ayanna Likens Cache County is scrambling for salt to clear the roads — and the money to pay for it. After facing nearly non-stop snowstorms, Matt Sprague, a snow plow driver, said this is the first year the county has run out of salt. “We have been going through more salt this year than any other year,” Sprague said. “The plow drivers have been working 18-hour days to find more salt and to clear the roads.” Steven Thomas, another snowplow driver for Cache County, said there is not enough salt in Northern Utah bays. As a result, drivers have been making a four-hour-round-trip drive to Grantsville just for salt. “We are out of salt all the way to Ogden,” Thomas said. “Because of the shortage, keeping up with the snow has been a challenge this winter season.” Cache County Council members said they used up their entire annual salt budget in the first month of the year. “We never expected this to happen, so we are taking money from different places to fund the salt,”...

By Miranda Tilley Logan residents are nearly evenly split on whether the city should take action to reduce the population of deer within city limits, according to the results of a new survey — and the lack of a clear majority opinion on the matter has left city leaders still struggling to decide what to do. On Tuesday the council announced the results of the  optional, mail-in survey, which was conducted by students at Utah State University. The results show 47 percent of people don’t think anything needs to be done to reduce the amount of deer within the city’s limits. Those who do want the city to take further action are divided on what steps to take. The council agreed on   Sept. 20   that the deer population in Logan had grown to a dangerously high level and something needed to be done. As a result, the survey was sent to randomly selected residents within Logan's boundaries on   Sept. 26 , with the purpose of better understanding resid...

By Miranda Tilley The Logan City Council on Tuesday approved a new student housing unit near Utah State University — over the objections of some residents who said their cherished views of Old Main would be blocked. The 55-foot-tall campus residential unit will be built on 6th East near Utah State University. Jan Nyman, a resident of Adams neighborhood, said the complex will be an “eyesore to the community and the university.” Neighbor Marilyn Griffin said she would “really like to not see any of these big buildings in front of Old Main.” The residents’ concerns sparked a conversation about protecting key viewsheds — like those including Utah State’s oldest and most iconic building. Mike DeSimone, Logan’s community development director, said the city has never defined specific views, like Old Main, that need to be protected. DeSimone said the intent of the plan for the complex was to intensify housing for students near campus. And that, he said, would alleviate another c...

By Miranda Tilley  Parking enforcement companies in Logan are worried a new ordinance regulating the time in which boots must be removed from cars could kill business and result in more towed cars. The regulation, passed by the Logan City Council on Tuesday, gives parking enforcers 90 minutes to remove boots from vehicles. It came in response to citizen complaints about excessive response times. The council had considered punishing enforcers with a class C misdemeanor for long responses. After hearing feedback from local parking enforcement companies, however, councilors voted to force the companies to offer free boot removal instead. Sam Bateman, a driver for Cache Auto Booting Services, fears the new ordinance will negatively affect his paycheck. “This job has been my primary source of everything except groceries, which we pay for with plasma money,” Bateman said. “I would be very thankful if this did not go through.” When a car is booted a notice is l...

By Jessica Dryden Community members are scrambling to find support for their bookmobile — the library-on-wheels that has been serving rural Cache County for the past 50 years. The Cache County Council will meet Tuesday to determine the bookmobile’s fate. With annual costs as much as $98,000, county executive Craig Buttars isn’t sure the county can afford the service anymore. “I am recommending that the funding for the bookmobile be discontinued because the offerings of the bookmobile are a duplication of services in many ways,” Buttars wrote in an e-mail. He wrote that the money saved would go toward “essential county services such as roads, fire and law enforcement.” A Facebook page entitled “Save the Rich/Cache Bookmobile” has been created by the Cache Valley Library Association in an effort to garner support and awareness within the community. The page’s creators are urging community members to contact county council members and voice their concern over the possible loss ...

By Miranda Tilley Some Logan residents have been illegally adding to their antler collections by poaching the deer that roam the city’s streets. According to city officials a few bow hunters have either shot or harvested deer in the Hillcrest, Adams and Island neighborhoods over recent weeks. “In one instance, the deer died right in front of a resident and people came and just picked it up and took it away,” Logan councilwoman Jeannie Simmonds said.  A program in North Logan, developed with the assistance of the Division of Wildlife Resources last year, authorized highly skilled archers to shoot deer that were living within that city’s limits. The program was intended to manage the overall population of urban deer while not necessarily eliminating them altogether. Logan city mayor Craig Petersen stressed that this program does not exist in his city, and called on residents to report any hunters seen in town. “People had seen bow hunters and they thought Logan city ha...

By Bronson Teichert A federal campaign to “promote and strengthen” LGBT communities in rural America is being met with a bit of skepticism in Utah — from an LBGT advocate. Michelle Bogden-Holt, the director of the Access and Diversity Center at Utah State University, said she’s concerned the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s LGBT Rural Summit Series might come across as a top-down effort to push acceptance on rural Americans. “In my experience I have always found that it works better from the bottom up, because you have everyone involved as opposed to a big governmental agency coming in and saying, ‘you have to do this,’” Bogden-Holt said. “When that happens, you will have push-back.” The biggest changes, Bogden-Holt said, happen at a grass-roots level. That perspective aligns Bogden-Holt with Utah state Representative Michael Noel, a Republican rancher from Kanab who said he didn’t think the campaign was “necessarily” needed. Noel, however, made it clear that he was open t...