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School District Will Sell Granite High School

Granite School District

  A plan to turn the old Granite High School into a movie studio has fallen through and the property could now be sold to a private buyer.  

Originally, the city of South Salt Lake hoped to buy the 27-acre Granite High School property and renovate its historic buildings.  But, two years ago, voters rejected a $25 million bond issue needed to do that by just nine votes.

Then, last fall, the city of South Salt Lake announced an agreement to have the Woodbury Corporation and Redman Movies and Stories to take over the site.  But Redman hasn’t been able to raise enough money to make the deal work.

Granite School District spokesperson Ben Horsley says they’re now planning to sell to a private buyer, even though that wasn’t their first choice.

“It has always been the intent and the goal of the district, if there was the ability to do so to maintain that as open space by selling that to a local government entity, whether that was the county or the city, so that could be maintained," Horsley tells KUER.  "We thought that would be a benefit to the community.  Unfortunately, there was just not a funding mechanism to make that happen.”

The 27-acre Granite High School site was appraised at about $8.5 million when South Salt Lake was negotiating to buy the property.  Now, Horsley says they’ll do a new appraisal that will probably come in higher than that.

Dan Bammes… KUER News.

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