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Show land Use Planninq Tough Legislative Item I he Utah legislature has a dale wiili destiny early next year when it opens debate on the highly high-ly controversial issue of land use planning, according ac-cording to C, Booth Wal-leiuine, Wal-leiuine, executive vice president of (he Utah Farm Bureau Federation. .in .imuiai report to the members of the state Farm Bureau in convention conven-tion in Salt Lake City today, to-day, Wallentine said the land use planning legislation legisla-tion may be one of the most important issues ever considered by the lawmakers. Governor Hampton recently re-cently announced he would call a special session to consider land use legislation legis-lation if the January 1974 legislative session "did not deal with the issue. Wallentine has represented repre-sented agriculture on a blue ribbon task force aDoointed bv the legislative legis-lative council to write a proposed land use planning plan-ning bill for I'tah. "Land use planning emphasized that the company's com-pany's participation, however, in no way affects af-fects the Arco-operated Colony Development Operation. Op-eration. "However, the company also feels that a variety of extraction technologies should be investigated in-vestigated to promote future fu-ture extraction efficiencies." efficien-cies." The Paraho process has been in successful commercial use for several sev-eral years in the calcination calcina-tion of limestone. Its successful suc-cessful adaptation to retorting re-torting oil shale could open up the large shale deposite in the tri-state are of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming as a source of synthetic crude oil, low sulfur fuel oil and substitute natural gas. raises fears in the minds of almost all citizens who understand the issue. And' it ought to because land use planning deals with property rights, and properly pro-perly rights are absolutely abso-lutely inseparable from basic human rights in a socie.v," Wallentine said. The Farm Bureau leader lead-er added that some land use legislation is needed. need-ed. "Farmers and ranchers, ranch-ers, speaking through the Farm Bureau, favor the principle of land use planning. plan-ning. We have to. Farmers Farm-ers are citizens too. We recognize some direction must be given to the burgeoning bur-geoning growth our state and nation are experiencing." experien-cing." "After all, most of this grow th has taken land out of agriculture. We lose more than a million acres yearly of prime agricultural land to urban ur-ban development. So farmers and ranchers have a personal interest as well as a broader concern con-cern for the future of the country," he pointed out. But Wallentine warned against moving too rapidly ra-pidly with strict controls on land use. "Traditional "Tradition-al property rights have guaranteed an owner the privilege of using his land tn any way he di-sires di-sires so long as that use does not infringe upon the rights of others. 'Farm Bureau is totally total-ly opposed to the philosophy philo-sophy that all land is really owned by the public pub-lic and that no one actually ac-tually owns land. That's socialism and we must be very careful not to let that philosophy creep into our decision-making on the subject of land use planning." Although he acknowledged acknow-ledged the idea w ill shock some people, Wallentine said the time has come for society to develop a method to fully compensate compen-sate property owners who lose income opportunities through land use planning decision. "When a man's land is designated as agricultural agricul-tural land by a government govern-ment edict, he often loses the oppor tunity to sell his land for development. At the same time, his neighbor neigh-bor across the road has farm land designated for future development. Ob viously one man is made richer' and the other is made poorer by that decision," de-cision," he added. "If society is to be given the power, through government, to make that kind of a decision, it will no longer be enough to just reduce taxes on the farm land and tell the owner to be happy. Constitution- al rights are involved here and they must be protected." Wallentine said Farm Bureau leaders are being be-ing urged to become actively ac-tively involved in positive posi-tive efforts to find acceptable accep-table solutions to the land use planning challenge. I |