SALT LAKE CITY—More than four years after Utah sought to protect assets in a polygamous church’s land trust, the state’s plan seems to have backfired—the trust is mired in debt, tangled in lawsuits and some of the land that was supposed to be preserved is poised for court-ordered sale.
“It’s in terrible shape and that wasn’t supposed to be the case,” said Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff.
The $100 million-plus United Effort Plan Trust holds most of the homes and property in Hildale, Utah, Colorado City, Ariz., and Bountiful, British Columbia, communities long dominated by members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS).
The Utah courts seized the trust in 2005 after state attorneys alleged church president Warren Jeffs—then a fugitive from Arizona criminal charges—had used trust assets for personal benefit and left it vulnerable to liquidation from default judgments in civil lawsuits filed in 2004.
“We are stepping up to protect the interests of the beneficiaries because Warren Jeffs has not,” Shurtleff said at the time.
The intervention was supposed to be simple and temporary, Shurtleff said. The goal was to get an accounting of trust assets and install a new board of trustees that would treat church members more fairly than Jeffs. Among the complaints against the polygamist leader: he used trust assets to control his followers, rewarding the most faithful with the best homes and land.
But the task of managing the trust has become anything but temporary.
Court-appointed accountant Bruce Wisan was handed control of the trust, but had no books or property records, no cash for management duties and little cooperation from FLDS members. Most remain faithful to Jeffs despite his arrest and incarceration on a 2007 criminal conviction on Utah charges of rape as an accomplice.
Wisan’s efforts—from collecting property taxes to platting a subdivision of the twin border towns of Hildale and Colorado City—have been met with resistance or silence.
Wisan has had to fight the Colorado City town marshal’s office to ensure court orders were followed and has bickered with the city councils of both towns over a proposed subdivision. Currently more than a half-dozen lawsuits are pending, land sales are held up and without a source of income, trust debts—which didn’t exist before state intervention—have mounted to nearly $3 million. Most of that is owed to Wisan and his attorneys.
In addition, unpaid 2007 Arizona taxes have left some 150 homes and properties in Colorado City at risk for foreclosure.
“I had no sense of what was going to happen, no crystal ball,” said Wisan. “If I had known how difficult this was going to be, I might have thought differently about taking the assignment.”
The FLDS view state intervention in the trust as an attack on their religion designed to dismantle their polygamous way of life. From the start, faithful sect members rejected Wisan’s management, mostly ignoring his directives unless threatened with eviction from their homes.
Even then only some cooperated. Others just left town, taping their house keys to their front doors.
Sect members changed course in August 2008, suing to block the sale of 438 acres of farm and range land known as Berry Knoll, which is said to have been set aside as a building site for a temple.
The lawsuit led to settlement talks and a proposal brokered by Shurtleff that would have returned most of the land held by the trust to FLDS church control. The church also agreed to pay off the nearly $3 million in debt.
Utah’s Third District state Judge Denise Lindberg rejected the proposal, siding with Wisan and the Arizona attorney general’s office, also a party in the dispute, in saying the deal was one-sided and favored the FLDS over other beneficiaries.
In her July ruling, Lindberg also said trust properties could not go to the church, but had to be distributed to individual beneficiaries. A major sticking point was the church’s belief in and practice of polygamy, which is banned under state law. Lindberg said the trust could not support any illegal activity.
Lindberg has since said Wisan can sell Berry Knoll in order to pay trust bills. The ruling is in part a reaction to an FLDS refusal to pay about $65,000 monthly in court-ordered occupancy fees on homes inhabited by church members. Wisan is negotiating the sale of the land to a developer from a neighboring Arizona polygamous sect.
Some settlement negotiations have continued, but Wisan said the sides remain at an impasse and most issues will have to be settled through lawsuits.
“They’ve come to the table now, but with an iron fist,” Wisan said of the FLDS. “Their idea of a settlement is ‘give us everything back.’ That’s not palatable.”
But caught in a tug of war between religious beliefs and legal rules, finding a palatable solution to the problem of the trust may not be possible.
For the FLDS, communal living is rooted in religion. Sect members formed the UEP in 1942 on a principle known as the Holy United Order, which calls for the sharing of assets for the benefit of all who follow the tenets of the faith. Assets, including homes, undeveloped land or other resources were distributed by church bishops to FLDS families based on need.
Land or other assets donated by individuals to the trust are considered consecrated to God and can’t be taken back by the donor, FLDS attorney Rod Parker explained.
Historically, leaving the faith—whether by choice or through excommunication—has meant severing ties with family and leaving behind anything given to the trust.
Under Wisan’s leadership, however, the trust has been rewritten. It’s new secular goals call for breaking up the communal property holdings to allow for private ownership of homes. The beneficiary class has also been expanded to include former church members. Some have moved back to the community, in some cases ratcheting up already strained community and family relationships.
Parker, who has represented the FLDS for more than 20 years, says the trust should never have become a secular entity.
“This is just a taking, it’s a theft,” he said. “That’s how we see it.”
Shurtleff said he “never intended for this to go on forever,” but sees no way to reduce the friction without significant concessions on both sides.
“There is plenty of blame to go around,” he said.
The FLDS must accept the court’s jurisdiction and respect court orders despite their religious beliefs, Shurtleff said.
“I don’t think they can change (their beliefs) and that predates Warren Jeffs,” Shurtleff said. “But they have to play the game. They are dealing with an earthly tribunal right now and an earthly judge and it’s not going to kill them.”
Simply removing Wisan as the trust’s manager isn’t a viable option, said Shurtleff, who praised Wisan’s depth of understanding of the trust.
But, it’s important for Wisan, the board and Arizona officials, to let go of any ideas about altering or eliminating FLDS culture, said Shurtleff.
“They have to stop thinking that the ultimate goal in this is to socially engineer the FLDS out of existence or to change their religion,” he said. “That’s not the role of the court and that’s not the role of government.”
