FACEBOOK MAKES THE FIRST MOVE IN THE PLAY FOR RURAL UTAH.

AuthorChristensen, Lisa

The social media giant is building their new dala center in Eagle Mountain. Here's what that means for the area.

Way out in western Utah County is a plot of land that stretches against a background of rolling hills and wide-open sky.

The parcel is situated near ample power and fiber-optic connectivity running through the heart of Eagle Mountain City. There's plenty of water for development and a city government eager to work with businesses. But it's been tough to get companies to catch the vision the city has for the area, says Aaron Sanborn, director of economic development for Eagle Mountain City.

"We take companies out there and they see sagebrush. They go to other places and they see 1-15, they see all the things right there," he says. "We say, let's imagine, let's dream what this looks like."

But in May, Facebook caught that vision.

The social media giant announced it would be building a new 970,000-square foot data center in Eagle Mountain, complete with more than $100 million in infrastructure investment that will help open the floodgates for other companies to put down roots in the rapidly growing city.

In some respects, the process to bring Facebook to Utah was short--a matter of months. But years of careful municipal planning went into greasing the wheels to allow it to happen so quickly.

EAGLE MOUNTAIN: A BLANK CANVAS FOR INDUSTRIAL GROWTH

Eagle Mountain is a young city; the first homes only broke ground in the mid-1990s. Located west of Lehi with a view of both the glittering windows of Silicon Slopes office buildings and expansive, rolling hills, much of the city exists in clusters of houses or shopping centers strung together by the city's thoroughfare, the Pony Express Parkway. In those spaces between, horses graze in fields and sagebrush and cheatgrass sway in the breeze.

It's the kind of place where people go to be close enough to have the conveniences of a city but without the hustle and bustle that tends to follow. Mr. Sanborn says because it's such a new community, city leaders have had the chance to help it grow in specific ways that will ultimately help when the still-slender trees growing in the median of the parkway are tall and thick.

"We need to make sure that we're staying on top of things, we're being able to help guide growth in proper areas where it won't have negative impacts to our community," he says. "We've been able to balance all these competing interests to provide a place where people who are just starting out can come in but also have chances to grow."

Eagle Mountain has taken a hands-on approach through its first two decades of life. Its enthusiasm for purposefully crafting the kind of place it wants to be is what attracted Mr. Sanborn to it in the first place. He came first to the city as a graduate intern in the summer of 2014. Later that year, he was hired on full time as an analyst, and promoted to director of economic development two years...

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