Best Friends Roadhouse and Mercantile to cater to guests and their four-legged friends

The new Best Friends Roadhouse and Mercantile in Kanab on Highway 89/300 West provides pet-friendly lodging. Best Friends founders and property developers, construction crew and staff have provided a facility where all buildings and lodging areas are pet-friendly. There is also a large pet park, complete with a water feature, a grooming area for cleaning up your pet and a stage on the property that will host some entertainment, as well as occasional animal education programs. At Best Friends they have four cabins, eight cottages and six RV sites. Southern Utah News

Cedar Breaks to replace old log cabin with $1M visitor center

Cedar Breaks National Monument officials are finalizing plans for a new visitor contact station to replace the small cabin they’ve been working out of for nearly 50 years. The new center is being funded by the Forever Project, Iron County and the National Park Service and is estimated to cost over $1 million.


The project was selected as one of the NPS Centennial Challenge projects in 2015, in which the NPS leveraged $68 million in funding from Congress to match selected parks’ contribution to their projects on a one to one basis. St. George News

Brian Head Resort Makes Major Improvements

Brian Head Resort plans to add $6.5 million worth of capital improvements to the Navajo Lodge and on-hill facilities this summer. The biggest improvement is a new high-speed detachable quad chair lift. Currently, the Navajo side of the mountain is being served by a triple chair lift, and the replacement lift will mean both main areas at the resort will be served by high-speed lifts.

Brian Head officials are also planning to complete an expansion project to the Navajo Lodge, which houses the resort's ski school, snowboarding school, kid's camp, rental area, restaurants and dining spaces. The expansion will add a total of 12,000 square feet to the building. He said it's sometimes difficult to find space for guests to move around efficiently or find places to sit and eat on busier days of the year. The Spectrum

St. George Ironman brings dollars to area

IRONMAN 70.3 St. George is not just the North American Pro Championship, it also pumps millions of dollars into the city's economy. Last year, IRONMAN brought 8,213 visitors and an estimated $7 million in direct economic impact to the area, according to the St. George Tourism Office. Officials expect this year’s impact to be similar to that of 2018. The Spectrum

My Place Hotel breaking ground

Builders are breaking ground on a new My Place Hotel in Hurricane. The three-story, 46-room hotel will be the fourth My Place built in Utah, and the second in Washington County, joining one in St. George that opened earlier this year. The Spectrum

Grand opening celebration for Hampton Inn & Suites St. George

Sun River Hotel Group, a partnership with SunRiver Commercial Development, ISR Development LC and Wittwer Hospitality, hosted a grand opening celebration and ribbon cutting for its newest property, Hampton Inn & Suites St. George at SunRiver. The new 120-room hotel is joining more than 2,200 Hampton by Hilton properties around the world. The hotel group is also developing a second, resort-style, hotel adjacent to the new Hampton Inn & Suites that will complement the quickly growing commercial and residential developments at Exit 2 and Southern Parkway. St. George News

Lodging numbers for Cedar City LDS Temple open house below expectation

The three-week open house for the new Latter-day Saints temple brought more than 180,000 people to Cedar City last year, but recently released numbers show many of the visitors didn’t stay overnight.

Tours of the interior and grounds of the new temple ran from Oct. 27-Nov. 18. According to the results of Cedar City’s municipal transient room tax (TRT), approximately $20,447 was generated in 2017 — $388 more than the area saw the year prior.

November saw the biggest impact with a nearly $5,000 increase to approximately $14,373 in reported TRT compared to $8,936 in 2016. The 4.25 percent tax is added onto every room night sold at lodgings in Iron County. Cedar City also has an additional 1 percent municipal tax. The numbers were significantly lower than Iron County/Brian Head Tourism Bureau officials expected. The Spectrum

Youth Tournaments Bring Visitors, Large Economic Impact to St. George during President's Day Weekend

Following a consistent migration pattern, youth teams from the north got an early start on their seasons by participating in three massive tournaments over the Presidents’ Day weekend. These events utilized nearly every patch of grass in the St. George area. Attracting some of the largest crowds this holiday weekend is the Rage Invitational soccer tournament, which includes 266 teams and an estimated 4,000 players, coaches and officials.

The Rage Invitational tournament brings an estimated 11,000 people into the St. George and Washington City area for a fun recreational weekend of soccer according to officials. The Ice Breaker Soccer Tournament brought a significant quantity of visitors to the area, with 246 teams and nearly 4,000 total participants.

In addition to the soccer tournaments, a plethora of out-of-town visitors also come to St. George to participate in the Rocky Mountain School of Baseball’s sizable Presidents’ Day Tournament. The event includes 125 competition teams — adding up to approximately 2,000 players, coaches and umpires.

The economic impact of the youth athletic tournaments is significant, given the fact that each player is accompanied by family members who stay at area hotels, dine at restaurants and spend money shopping or on other outdoor recreational activities. Historically, an average of more than three-quarters of the participants for these tournaments are from outside the area. The sports commission estimates the economic impact of those three tournaments to be approximately $15 million. Utah Business Magazine

Report: Cultural businesses generated $76M, 2,000 jobs in Iron County last year

Businesses related to arts, humanities and culture in Iron County generated $76.1 million in spending last year and employed nearly 2,000 people, according to the Utah Cultural Alliance.

The Alliance highlighted Iron County in its annual “State of Utah Cultural Report,” which found that cultural businesses in the state accounted for $3.5 billion in revenue and provided jobs for 79,328 people. A press release from the Alliance did not include data for Washington County. Iron County was higher than typical in direct spending because most patrons were visitors. St. George News

Record number of sports participants bring in over $78 million to St. George in 2017

Healthy competition has been good for the economy in Washington County. In 2017, 42 major athletic events brought more than 62,000 participants and over 116,000 out-of-town visitors to the area. The result was a whopping $78 million in direct economic impact, according to a news release from the St. George Area Sports Commission, thousands in tax relief for residents and hundreds of thousands more in media exposure for the area. St George News

Zion, Bryce Canyon both set new records for numbers of visitors in 2017

Utah's most popular national parks are only getting more popular, with both Zion and Bryce Canyon National Park reporting record numbers of visitors in 2017. Zion National Park saw more than 4.5 million visitors over the course of the year, a 5 percent increase over 2016, which had been the record year with 4.3 million visitors, according to figures published by the National Park Service. At Bryce Canyon, the figure was 2.6 million, a 9-percent increase over 2016, which was also the previous record holder at 2.4 million. Both parks have seen visitation grow by more than 40 percent since 2010, with steady increases in traffic each year. The Spectrum

St. George, Cedar City announced as host cities for 2018 Tour of Utah

Organizers announced that the route for the men's professional cycling race will include both St. George and Cedar City. The seven-stage event will start in St. George on Aug. 6 before ultimately ending on Aug. 12 in Park City. Dixie will make its initial appearance in the Tour of Utah for the prologue portion before riders begin the first stage the next day on Aug. 7. This is the fourth time the Festival City will be included in the route. The Spectrum

Courtyard by Marriott opens in Cedar City

The newest hotel in Cedar City, a Courtyard by Marriott at 1294 Interstate Dr., has opened. The four-story hotel, which will operate as a Marriott franchise, owned and managed by Safari Hospitality of Cedar City, will feature 112 guest rooms, an indoor swimming pool, fitness center, guest laundry and 3,200 square feet of available meeting space. The Spectrum

Zion sets visitation record, highlighting crowding concerns

Zion National Park has already set a new visitation record with a month left to go in 2017, a milestone that highlights concerns about overcrowding. Nearly 4.4 million people visited the park through the end of November, an increase of about 5 percent over last year.

Attendance at Zion has risen steadily over the past decade and is up some 70 percent since 2010, when there were 2.7 million visitors for the year. The new numbers come as park officials weigh a first-of-its kind reservation system and the National Park Service considers hiking fees to $70 per car during the peak summer season at several popular parks, including Zion. The plan announced in October would more than double the entry fees at 17 national parks that now charge $25 or $30 per vehicle. Prices for national park passes and senior passes would be unchanged. Officials say the higher fees are needed to address an $11 billion maintenance backlog that's built up as park funding stayed flat. Deseret News

Groundbreaking held for Kanab Center

November 20 marked the groundbreaking for the Kanab Center convention building. The Kanab Center is located where the old middle school building used to be on the bend in downtown Kanab. The school district donated 13 acres to this project to benefit of the entire county. The Kanab Center will be built without having to go to the taxpayers. Funding has/will come from Transient Room Taxes (TRT) being saved for the project; a $3.7 million CIB grant/low interest loan, which will be paid for by future TRT’s. Southern Utah News

Utah State University study says national monuments are neither economic ‘boon nor bane’

A recent study by Utah State University professors Paul Jakus and Sherzod Akhundjanov concludes that landscape-scale monuments are “neither a boon nor a bane.” The USU economists compared changes in per-capita income for Garfield and Kane with changes in Utah’s other counties and four bordering counties in Arizona. They found incomes rose in step with comparable counties, although they remain lower than the state as a whole. They applied their methodology to three other big Clinton-era monuments — Canyons of the Ancients, Carrizo Plain and Upper Missouri River Breaks — and came up with similar results.

The Grand Staircase designation precluded the development of promising coal leases on the Kaiparowits Plateau, but that lost opportunity was offset by the dozens of businesses established in the towns rimming the monument to serve visitors and migrants coming to enjoy the region’s beauty, said Jakus, who heads USU’s Center for Society, Economics and the Environment.

The USU study also concluded the Staircase designation had minimal impact on grazing, despite ranchers’ complaints that monument rules are putting them out of business. Declines in stocking levels, it found, were likely the result of the cyclical nature of the cattle industry, which happened to peak the year the monument was designated, and persistent drought, which has reduced available forage. Salt Lake Tribune

Hotel building boom hits southwest Utah

More than 400 new hotel rooms have been built in southwestern Utah since January, and more than 450 more are expected to be finished by year’s end, according to a market report from real estate services group NAI Excel. There are three new hotels under construction in St. George, four in Springdale and one each in Cedar City, Hurricane and Virgin. Later this year, four more are planned to go up in St. George, one more in Hurricane, one in LaVerkin and one in Ivins. The Spectrum

Zion to get new funding for trails

The Department of the Interior announced more than $50 million in new money for high priority maintenance and infrastructure projects at 42 national parks, including nearly $700,000 at Zion to help restore and maintain the popular Emerald Pools trails. The costs will be evenly split, with $346,337 allocated from Congress and $348,240 coming from private partners. The Spectrum

High Economic Value of Quiet Recreation in Southern Utah

Non-motorized (quiet) recreation activities like camping, hiking, hunting, mountain biking and wildlife viewing on public lands are a significant economic driver in local communities near where the recreation activities take place according to a new report by the independent firm ECONorthwest.

The report titled “Quiet Recreation on BLM-Managed Lands in Southwest Utah” shows that in 2015 the 364,000 quiet recreation visits to SW Utah BLM lands generated $17.4 million in direct spending within 50 miles of the recreation sites. The study shows 204 Utah jobs are supported locally as a result of quiet recreation visits to BLM Land.

The report comes as the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is updating their resource management plan for the Cedar City Region. The BLM’s Cedar City Field Office in Southern Utah oversees 2.1 million acres of public land within Iron and Beaver counties. This report is the first ever to quantify both the amount of quiet recreation and the spending associated with quiet recreation specifically on BLM lands in this region of Southern Utah. Utah Business Magazine

BLM issues decision on proposed Zion-area oil and gas leasing

Officials with the Bureau of Land Management announced they would turn down a request to offer up federal lands just outside of Zion National Park for oil and gas leasing.

The decision ends speculation about oil drilling and other extraction efforts on three pieces of land in Washington County, with BLM officials citing opposition from local and state government as well as the public. Officially, the three parcels were deferred, meaning they would undergo further evaluation as part of future planning processes. The Spectrum