Let’s call the Lost Creek Community Zone what it actually is: a request to cash in on the rural character of Browns Canyon, while every cost of that decision — the traffic, the water, the sewer, the wildfire risk, the noise, the light — gets handed to the neighbors who didn’t ask for any of it, and to the county taxpayers who will spend decades paying to catch up.
Today, Browns Canyon is zoned for one home per 80 acres as part of the Eastern Summit County General Plan, which explicitly protects the area’s rural, small-town, agricultural character.
Ivory Homes wants the county to throw out or ignore the plan for all Eastern Summit County and replace it with a six-mile long, one-mile wide, brand-new zoning category to support their desire to put 3,002 units on their roughly 407 acres. That’s not growth, it’s a phase change.
Initially, when it looked like the county wouldn’t play along, Ivory tried to go around it
by filing a petition with the Lieutenant Governor’s Office to incorporate Browns
Canyon as its own town. Only when the request failed did “working with the community” become the company’s stated preference. That’s a developer testing every lever, public and private, until one gives.
The Planning Commission has already told this applicant in writing that its draft fails to meet the county’s own conditions — insufficient contiguity, insufficient buffering, insufficient response to nearly every concern raised in June. Still, the project keeps coming back, barely revised, banking on the idea that enough resubmissions eventually look like consent.
Commissioners themselves have said what should worry every resident of this county: Approve this zone, and you haven’t approved one project — you’ve built the template every ambitious developer will use in Browns Canyon and the rest of eastern Summit
County.
Ivory’s engineering summary admits the project has no secured water rights — just a hope that three or four new wells will be enough, someday. It admits there’s no functioning sewer system, and that the plan depends on a water reclamation district that, by its own description, has no master plan to handle it. It offers no binding traffic mitigation for a rural two-lane road never built to carry a 3,000-unit town.
Every one of those gaps will eventually be filled by taxpayers.
And it isn’t just the developer’s own land whose character gets destroyed. When you put hundreds of new residents within a hundred feet or two of several small ranches, they don’t get to stay a ranch, not really, not for long.
My dirt bike, legal and unremarkable today, becomes “too loud.” The stable next door becomes “too smelly.” Target practice on my own land becomes “too dangerous” to the new neighbors who moved in a few hundred feet from a pasture that was here before they were.
None of that requires a single new ordinance. It happens through complaint after complaint, code-enforcement call after code enforcement call, until the rural use that was required for fifty years quietly becomes impractical, and then legally untenable.
This zone doesn’t just rezone Ivory’s land. Who is supposed to protect us from that? That’s not a rhetorical question. It’s literally job of the Eastern Summit County Planning Commission to protect the property rights of its residents. We hope they see it that way.
The project design shifts the negative value impacts to adjacent property owners. The highest-density parcels — 12 to 15 units per acre — aren’t tucked into the interior. They sit at the edges, hard against the property lines of longtime landowners. No material buffer requirement. No step-down in density at the perimeter. No protection for the people who will wake up next to a wall of townhomes instead of the pasture that’s been there for fifty years.
That isn’t an oversight. It’s a design choice to maximize the value of the developer’s land and push the biggest impacts to other property owners.
And let’s be honest about whose idea this actually is. It’s Ben Rogers, son of Ed Rogers, who founded the Garff-Rogers Ranch with his brother-in-law in 1977. This is land so beautiful that the first season of “Yellowstone” was filmed on it — I watched them do it.
In 2021, when a different developer floated turning this same land into a new city, Ben Rogers put his name on a public statement promising the family had no plans to change the land’s use, and that they valued the open space they had ranched and grazed for nearly five decades.
Four years later, he’s the one who brought Ivory Homes to the table for up
to 3,000 homes. The canyon’s other landowners are the ones who will live with the consequences of that change of heart long after the closing check has cleared.
This is not a fight about growth versus no growth. Summit County can absorb thoughtful development. This is a fight about whether one developer gets to profit from re-writing the rules for an entire rural canyon, externalize the costs and the loss of rights onto everyone else.
There is a scheduled public hearing in Kamas on Thursday regarding this proposed development. Details should be posted soon at summitcountyutah.gov/2341/Meeting-Minutes
I encourage everyone to attend or write to Eastern Summit County Planning Commission and express your opinion.
Bryan Crino
Browns Canyon landowner