March 2017 | Business View Magazine

124 125 Holladay, Utah we’re hemmed in by the Wasatch Mountains to the east and other communities that are also somewhat built-out to our north, south, and west,” says Allred. “And we don’t have green- fields. So, from a land-use perspective, without raw land, it’s very hard for a city like ours to keep our tax base growing.”“We don’t have any manufacturing or industrial park opportunities or zoning,” Dahle adds. “We have very limited office opportunities.We don’t have a huge opportunity to seek out businesses to locate here because we just don’t have the raw land or variety of zones available.” One particular situation that has helped limit commercial development in Holladay has been the inability of the city and the owner of the defunct Cottonwood Mall on the west side of town to agree on how the now vacant, 57-acre site should be utilized. The Cotton- wood Mall was originally constructed in the 1960s and was Utah’s first enclosed shopping mall. It closed in 2007. “The Cottonwood Mall project, which has been stalled for eight years, has been quite difficult for us.We don’t have a shared vision at this point in time,” says Allred. “We think it’s probably going to end up being much more residential than originally antic- ipated with a smaller commercial footprint,” The reason people live in Holladay is because it’s a great community to live in. We don’t want to damage the reason that people 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 commercial development at the expense of damag- ing the quality of life. rob dahle mayor