In the spring of 2010, Utah Valley University had a problem that had nothing to do with classrooms. A new student track was going up on the Orem campus, and it was eating the intramural fields. "We're in desperate need right now of additional intramural fields," Val Peterson, a university vice president, told the Deseret News.
Fields first
The answer lay about two miles to the west, across Interstate 15, on the cleared ground of Geneva Steel. In June 2010, UVU's trustees voted to buy 100 acres there from Anderson Geneva Development. The land was valued at $20 million, but the price to the school was far lower. The developer offered to donate half the value, and Vineyard's redevelopment agency pledged $5 million.
The university's student paper laid out the arithmetic: the school would need to raise about $5 million, partly from the proceeds of land sold to the Utah Transit Authority by Mountainland Applied Technology College and possibly a loan from the UVU Foundation. Athletics would chip in $1 million. A spokesman promised that tuition would not rise because of the deal. For now, he said, there were no hard plans beyond intramural fields.
The purchase needed approval from the Board of Regents, the State Building Board and the legislature, and it closed in September 2011. UVU's own records list the price of that south parcel as $5 million. Within a few years, students were playing intramural sports on fields laid out over old mill ground.
A second parcel
The developer wanted more than soccer players. At @Geneva's public open house in September 2013, UVU president Matthew Holland announced that the university held an option on 125 more acres. On June 18, 2014, he signed the deal. UVU paid $10.1 million for the north parcel, according to the university, and its Vineyard holdings reached 225 acres.
Holland called it a historic moment, and he explained why with one word. The Orem campus, he said, was "landlocked." The new land was about two miles from the main campus, and the two were expected one day to share a FrontRunner stop. Gerald Anderson, president of Anderson Development, was just as pleased. UVU, he said, made Geneva "kind of a college town."
What to build was left open. Holland mentioned academic buildings, more athletic fields, parking, space for public and private partnerships and a new home for administrative offices. The cabinet, he said, would take its time. Census estimates released in 2016 showed why the land mattered: Vineyard's population had jumped from 617 to 3,195 in 2015 alone, and the university already owned 225 acres in the middle of the boom.
Leases and plans
The first deals on the land were modest. In May 2018 the Board of Regents approved what one official called a public and private partnership with the Real Salt Lake Youth Academy Foundation. The foundation would lease six acres at 475 N. Mill Road for $1 a year over 40 years, build an indoor soccer facility with a field, locker rooms and offices, and give the UVU Foundation $2.6 million for outdoor fields and bleachers. The contract required the building to be finished by July 2019.
We're not in the business of selling land.Astrid Tuminez, UVU president, 2026
That September the university asked the regents for permission to grow again, buying 59.65 acres beside the Vineyard campus for $12.9 million in institutional funds. The parcel would extend the campus to a planned main road at 1200 North. Because of the land's history, the seller would have to clean it up first. The memo to the regents described the long term vision plainly: a significant satellite campus serving northern Utah County.
Under president Astrid Tuminez, the vision took a medical turn. At the President's Scholarship Ball in October 2023, the university unveiled plans for a Health and Wellness Village on the Vineyard campus, built with the Huntsman Cancer Institute, which pledged $1 million to a student training collaborative. Tuminez spoke of a shortage of nurses, physician assistants, respiratory therapists and mental health professionals.
UVU's campus plan now describes the Vineyard land as a university innovation district, with housing, shops, offices and academic buildings around a walkable core, and the wellness village at its center. The state would pay for academic buildings, and private investors for the rest. The university says it chose private partners through a formal request for proposals, and the site has been fully remediated, that construction will be phased over roughly two decades, and that groundbreaking is anticipated within two years.
In the meantime, the city grew up around the fields. By 2024 the university had laid out four interim sports fields to relieve pressure on Orem, and Huntsman Cancer Institute was building its own Vineyard campus on 20 acres of neighboring Utah City land, donated by that project's developers.
Still holding
In January 2026 the Utah Board of Higher Education approved an unusual deal. UVU would lease 4.83 acres of its Vineyard land to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for 50 years so the church could build meetinghouses, in exchange for $4.2 million paid over two years. The Salt Lake Tribune reported that UVU still owned more than 225 acres in the area but had not yet finalized plans or funding for a Vineyard campus.
Tuminez told the board why the school chose a lease over a sale. It wanted to keep the land for a future health focused satellite campus. "We're not in the business of selling land," she said. Sixteen years after the first vote for intramural fields, the university's Vineyard campus remains mostly a promise, but one the university is holding on to in the middle of a boomtown.
From vineyardhistory.org/stories/the-campus-that-waits/
