Heber Valley tractorcade rolls through North Fields Saturday to protest UDOT bypass plan

A vintage postcard showing the Northfields. Photo: Utah Open Lands

"UDOT is asking Utah taxpayers to write a billion-dollar blank check to save 70 seconds of drive time, while gambling with the valley’s drinking water" ~ North Field Irrigation Company board

HEBER CITY, Utah — Heber residents will take to “the fields” Saturday in a convoy of tractors, horses, side-by-sides, bicycles, and farm equipment in a planned protest route near the North Fields to demand the Utah Department of Transportation scrap its preferred route for the US-40 bypass, with just nine days left to submit public comments.

The public comment period for UDOT’s Draft Environmental Impact Statement closes March 9.

The details: The Heber Valley Tractorcade meets at 11 a.m. at Veterans Memorial Park, 600 W., and will travel through the North Fields near 1200 North before looping back via 1750 West and Midway Lane ending at the train station/parking lot.

The dispute in brief: UDOT selected Alternative B in January, a new highway alignment cutting through the North Fields rather than widening existing US-40. The agency says it reduces travel time between SR-32 and US-189 to roughly six minutes and displaces far fewer homes and businesses than Alternative A.

Protest organizers call it the “Billion Dollar Bypass” and argue the math doesn’t hold up saying that:

• Alternative B destroys 53.9 acres of wetlands vs. 22.5 acres under Alternative A, a 140% increase, while costing at least $48.6 million more by UDOT’s own figures.
• The North Field Irrigation Company, which has operated gravity-fed irrigation in the valley since 1860, filed a formal comment this month cataloging 99 deficiencies in the DEIS. It says 36 are individually sufficient to invalidate the environmental review or violate federal law.
• NFIC argues UDOT’s true cost exceeds $1 billion once excluded items are factored in, including a groundwater collector system, farm overpasses verbally committed to at a Feb. 11 county meeting but absent from any design drawing, severance damages, water rights acquisition, and up to 809 acres of wetland mitigation land.

What they’re saying:

“UDOT is asking Utah taxpayers to write a billion-dollar blank check to save 70 seconds of drive time, while gambling with the valley’s drinking water, destroying irreplaceable farmland that has been in local families for generations, and ignoring four years of warnings from the people who know this land best.” — NFIC Board of Directors

“The North and South Fields are part of our community identity. They are the open views that greet us every morning, the land that reminds us why we chose to live here, and the source of drinking water that flows to Deer Creek Reservoir. Once these fields are gone, they are gone forever.” — Bridget Whiting, Tractorcade organizer

UDOT has said Alternative B performs better for both regional and local travel, requires only eight relocations compared to 27 under Alternative A, and would allow construction while traffic remains on existing US-40. The agency has also committed to no additional interchanges through the North Fields to limit development pressure. (TownLift, Jan. 8)

The water question: NFIC’s formal comment argues UDOT’s own stormwater modeling shows deicing salt runoff would exceed the 500 mg/L legal standard for the Class IA pristine aquifer beneath the North Fields, the same aquifer feeding drinking water wells in Heber City, Midway, and Charleston and flowing downstream toward Deer Creek Reservoir. NFIC also says that UDOT’s DEIS proposes directing 100% of highway runoff into the ground with no lined basins and no contingency plan if the aquifer is compromised.

Comment before March 9 online: hebervalleyeis.udot.utah.gov