Dear HCN,
Although I appreciated
Lisa Church’s article on “Cloudrock,” the proposed luxury
resort development in Moab (HCN, 3/26/01: Luxury looms over Moab),
two important pieces of the story were missed.
When Church describes the developer of the proposed Cloudrock lodge
as “the Salt Lake-based Moab Mesa Land Company (MMLC),” she gets
both her geography and corporate genealogy wrong. The headquarters
of MMLC (and indeed, the phone number you printed to contact the
company) are located in New York City. The company itself is a
limited liability partnership between the developer, Michael Liss,
and his former employer, George Butterfield, the founder of the
travel giant Butterfield and Robinson (B&R), which is based in
Toronto, Canada. MMLC has no association with Salt Lake City,
excepting the cadre of lawyers that they’ve hired from there.
Although spokespersons at Butterfield and
Robinson — one of the largest “upscale” hiking and biking
companies in the world — presently deny any association
between Cloudrock and their company, until January of this year the
development was posted proudly on the B&R Web site. As well,
numerous public statements by Michael Liss have indicated that the
resort will be financed through and marketed by Butterfield and
Robinson. So, although MMLC is technically a partnership between
Mr. Liss (who sits on the Board of B&R) and Mr. Robinson, it is
more accurately a de facto subsidiary of the world-class travel
company that boasts of its “sensitivity” to local cultures in its
glossy 84-page catalog.
The importance of these
facts is directly related to the other core issue of the story
— the role of Utah’s School and Institutional Trust
Lands Administration in the Cloudrock fiasco. Ric McBrier of SITLA
boasts that the agency has over $300,000 budgeted in the current
year for so-called “block sales” similar to the 1,930-acre
Cloudrock proposal. McBrier’s glee over his line item begs
the question: Who can afford to purchase 2,000-acre parcels of
prime real estate on the Colorado Plateau? Certainly the answer is
not individuals, but corporations.
So
it’s not just luxury that looms over Moab and the rest of
southern Utah, but corporate control of what will eventually become
the majority of private land in the lower part of our state.
That’s what sticks in our craw down here, and keeps us
fighting, far more than the ritzy pamperedness of the proposed
Butterfield and Robinson development.
Mathew Gross
Moab, Utah
The writer belongs to the Moab Citizens Alliance.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Cloudrock is a cave-in to corporate control.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
