On this day, 158 years ago, Brigham Young and his band of pioneers arrived in the Salt Lake Valley, starting a migration that quickly turned Utah into a Mormon-dominated desert realm.You can read the full article here.
That domination - at least in terms of raw numbers - appears to be nearing its end.
Within the next three years, the Mormon share of Utah's population is expected to hit its lowest level since The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints started keeping membership numbers. And if current trends continue, LDS residents no longer will constitute a majority by 2030.
These projections are based on normally secret membership counts the LDS Church voluntarily hands over to Utah's Office of Planning and Budget, under what it assumed was a binding confidentiality agreement. The state planning office uses the county-by-county numbers to help estimate future population growth.
Through a public records request, The Salt Lake Tribune obtained the data from 1989 to 2004. State employees believe the LDS Church has provided the records since at least the 1960s but could retrieve only the numbers for 15 years and found no such confidentiality agreement.
Still, these 15 years are enough to identify a historic transformation in the makeup of Utah's ever-growing population.
Stated simply: "Utah is essentially becoming more like the nation," said Robert Spendlove, the planning office's lead demographer.
This raises some interesting questions, as the State of Utah aggressively recruits out-of state corporations, and considers abolition of the state corporate income tax, among other things. Although the planning office's lead demographer projects a "slow shift," such a projection fails to take into account, it seems to me, the sudden effect of corporate-related immigration, if Governor Hunstman's administration substantially succeeds in luring out-of-state companies to Utah, with a more manufacturing-friendly -- and generally business-friendly -- economic environment.
What say our gentle Weber County Forum readers? Will an influx of skilled workers and executives to Utah in the next few years accelerate the pace of Utah's already-documented demographic shift? How will this shift effect the local political climate? Is this really about mere Republican-Democrat politics, as the article suggests; or will these inevitable changes be more fundamental, and go beyond mere partisan party politics? How will these changes effect our unique local culture, and the manner in which politics are presently conducted in the State of Utah?
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