March 2017 | Business View Magazine

120 121 and then capitalizing on them. “Let’s enhance our sense of place,” he says. “Let’s focus on why our community is so livable and let’s not do anything to disturb that.” Dahle agrees: “The reason people live in Holladay is because it’s a great community to live in,” he declares. “We don’t want to damage the reason that peo- ple live here – it’s got great public schools; it doesn’t have a ton of traffic congestion; it doesn’t have a city government that is focused on trying to put as much density and commer- cial development at the expense of damaging the quality of life.” So, one important facet in maintaining that quality of life in Holladay is protecting the ar- ea’s natural environment with green programs and initiatives. “We live in a desert; we only get about 15 inches of rain per year,” says Allred. “We want to keep as much water going back into the ground and into our aquifers because we’re a thirsty community. So, we have an inno- vative ordinance that requires property owners to not pave too much of their property. That way, water goes back into the ground.” Holladay, Utah AT A GLANCE holladay, utah WHAT: A city of 31,000 WHERE: Southeast of Salt Lake City, and west of the Wasatch Mountains WEBSITE: www.cityofholladay.com Holladay is also a Tree City USA. “We have a lot of tree canopy,”Allred continues. “And of par- ticular interest to our residents is the mainte- nance of our tree canopy, because, again, being in a desert, it’s very important that we don’t lose trees if we don’t have to. So, we’re working on a tree protection ordinance that could potential- ly extend our purview over tree canopy lots into the private property realm,whereas, right now, we only regulate trees in the public right-of-way, or on commercial properties.Another thing that we do is we have a stream protection ordinance, which means if anybody builds within a hundred feet of our main creek that goes through the city, we require them to go through a review process with the Planning Commission to make sure they don’t negatively impact the stream.” In addition to protecting the city’s natural resources, Holladay is aggressively pursuing active transportation facilities for the benefit of its residents. “We have built quite a number of bike lanes, recently,” says Allred, “and we’ve added another bike route that just got com-