More Diesel in the Water

Yesterday I related the story of how the small town of Plain City, Utah spawned 4 giant national trucking companies. I was fortunate to visit Plain City, but should have driven another 20 miles up the road to Brigham City, a community of 17,400. Little did I know that Brigham City helped to start the truck stop industry. What is it with these Utah towns being so entrepreneurial in the trucking industry?

Paul Larsen, Planning and Economic Development Coordinator for Brigham City, related to me that Flying J Truck Stops, one of the three largest in the entire country started and was headquartered there until four years ago when it moved to Ogden. He told me, “The founder of Flying J was Jay Call. Jay lived here locally and loved to fly, thus the name of the business. He died a couple of years ago flying some friends to Sun Valley.” The company has $4 billion in annual sales and had a $23 million payroll in the town, which is HUGE in a community of this size. One of the main reasons that they moved from Brigham City was inadequate telecommunications infrastructure.

“The loss of Flying J lit a fire under our economic development program and we are making lots of progress. Our hope is to become the kind of small community that a Flying J type company would consider for a corporate location, or in which another Jay Call type entrepreneur would feel comfortable growing a business. Our telecommunication infrastructure will soon be world-class.” Paul is referring to the Utah Telecommunications Open Infrastructure Agency which will provide a state-of-the-art telecommunications backbone to every business in the community. Bandwidth will no longer be a limiting factor for a company like Flying J.

It’s too bad that they didn’t have this telecommunications infrastructure operational or perhaps they wouldn’t have lost Flying J. But Brigham City is a well diversified community with a strong agricultural (famous for their peaches and cherries) and manufacturing base. It has tremendous potential as a tourist and recreational location. Its history goes back to its founding in 1851 and it is the site of the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, where they are building a new visitors center, hoping to attract hundreds of thousands of bird watchers. Did you know that bird watching is the fastest growing leisure activity in the USA?

Paul told me that their manufacturing base is anchored by a “budding carbon fiber/composites cluster with ATK Thiokol, HyperComp Engineering, and IsoTruss Structures being significant players.” That is a great base to build upon.
Brigham City sounds like my kind of town. It’s too bad that they lost Flying J, but it sounds like the wake-up call from that loss has spurred them on tremendously. They have come to their “fork in the road” with this loss, but it hasn’t stopped them. They are pushing ahead, down a new fork, and are going to be on the cutting edge of telecommunications. I hope to visit in the near future.