Extended Interview

Daniel McArthur Mayor St. George, Utah   Read more extended interviews.

This interview has not been edited for content.

Interviewer:  What's so great about St. George?  Why are so many people moving here?

Daniel McArthur:  I call it the Dixie Spirit!  You know it comes about from the early days.  It was not a place that people enjoyed.  Brigham Young, the Mormon prophet, had to command the people to come down here.  There were about 309 families and after about a year there were only about 100 of them left.  My great-grandfather was one of those so we've been here since the beginning in 1861.  When people come into St. George I ask them why did you move here from Minnesota?  They go on about how cold it was and everything else, but they come to this unique place called St. George and there is just a feeling here.  That's why I call it the Dixie Spirit!  It's a constant battle but we inherited things from people before us so I've always said that we ride on the shoulders of giants who prepared the way for us to have what we're doing today.  Hopefully when there is somebody in this place, they'll say that the people before me did the same--we inherit something, we give it back.  It's like the property we own, we don't really own it.  It's always there but somebody else is going to own it later whether it's our kids or we sell it or something else, it's there so we just don't want to distract or take away from that.  We're giving stewardship to this for a time and we do the best we can with what it is and we hand it on to others hopefully in as good as a situation as it was handed or us or maybe better.  We know where are water comes from--most of it from south of the Virgin River drainage whether it's in the aquifer, the Navajo stand-stone.  We have 20 or 30 wells that give us water and I know our early pioneers took it from Pine Valley mountain forty miles away and brought it to an open ditch and later it was put in a pipeline and then we take it from springs and wells around the area and then in conjunction with the water conservancy district in our surrounding communities we pool our water resources and when that's used up the only place we can go is to Powell and so we're looking at Utah water that is stored in Lake Powell. 

Interviewer:  Talk about the potential pipeline that would come here.  How would that work and how would it benefit this community?

Daniel McArthur:  It would benefit us tremendously.  Obviously we're the last community in the state before water leaves the state.  In state law here you can't sell water.  When it leaves your jurisdiction it's going to go to another jurisdiction because water is always there, it's just treated and sent on.  Obviously when it leaves our state we would have the opportunity of either leasing that water, selling that water or doing something else but state law doesn't allow that.  We don't say that we have any extra water anyway.  But because the same thing… we're really the only place that can use the water that was stored out of the Flaming Gorge Reservoir, it goes down the Colorado River and it's stored in Lake Powell basically.  We have the opportunity to use that water so we're looking at that 80,000 acre feet of water that could actually be used for Washington County for growth and that's a higher quality of water than the water we're using out of the Virgin River today.

Interviewer:  Lets talk about this area.  Is this burgeoning growth good for St. George?

Daniel McArthur:  A growing community is a thriving community.  If you're not thriving and you're dead on the vine, you're not growing.  Now whether that growth… is it too big?  We've always been more than what the Governors Office of Planning and Budget is planning for and we see spurts.  We kind of go at an up and down curve and we're riding on one of the tops of one of those waves and it has been a long one and it does put a lot of stress on a lot of us trying to take care of it.  But if we couldn't take care of the infrastructure that we had, then we'd probably be the first to actually put a stop to it or slow it down on purpose, but because we're in a land of America and we believe that people have the right and freedom to do those things—sell their land and move and live where they want to live—our charge as government officials in my opinion, is to try to provide and take care of that growth without losing the quality of life.  That's where walking that fine line is tough because where do you lose that?  We're very successful in bringing outside people in here for lots of tournaments because of our weather and climate, our elevation and all of these things that people want to live and retire.  They pick healthy communities and we're a healthy community with very small amounts of private land and lots of federal and open space and national parks and scenic wonders and mixed in with all of that are a lot of environmental issues that we have to deal with.  We walk a very fine line but to answer your question about is growth good for us, yes growth is good in most cases but along with it comes some things that you don't like, maybe crime that you haven't had in the past and maybe some of the things that bring the gang element and other things that we're dealing with, but we're trying to do the best we can and we don't have any higher incident than any place else in the nation.  One time
St. George was bigger than Las Vegas.  It was along time ago.  We attract a different clientele.  Vegas is the night life and the food and the glitter and all that.  Ours is more the open space and healthy environment and the family atmosphere, all of those kind of things, but yet get close to the other but not living there which to me it tends to say that there is higher crime in that area and other things that I don't want to have.  I'd much rather live here but I'm close enough to there that I can access the world through their airport and other things and so this is a good distance for me from a metropolitan area such as Las Vegas.

Interviewer:  Many cities in the West are growing so quickly, not just St. George but Phoenix, Tucson and Las Vegas, and Salt Lake City.  What do you think is going to happen say in the next ten to twenty years in terms of growth?

Daniel McArthur:  Well we have to plan our growth and then just look at it because you take me… I'm the only one out of… I've got ten grandchildren, six children, a spouse that comes from the Wasatch Front and only one of all of those other people were actually residents or natives of St. George.  All of the rest of them were from somewhere else.  So as I look at this, most of our growth is coming from within.  People want to return to their roots, come back to St. George or they're related to somebody that wants to come here and it fills this little niche that I say there are only two types of people: those who live in St. George and those that are going to.  There is a lot of truth to that.  A lot of people want to come here.  We use to be…our Chamber of Commerce one time when I was a young kid it was called "where the summer sun spends the winter."  Then we became known as "The other Palm Springs."  Now we're St. George—we're the destination.  We've got all the amenities and stores and everything, except maybe the connectivity that we really want to the world through air services which we're working on.