Yet another report was released recently that paints a bleaker-than-average picture of Tooele County's health. According to a state health department survey, the county is one of the Top 10 most overweight areas in Utah, with 63 percent of the population qualifying as overweight or obese.

The reasons we're so fat are myriad. There's the daily commute that eats into our free time, the proliferation of fast-food restaurants that cater to commuter dietary habits, city plans designed around the automobile rather than the pedestrian, the screen-based lifestyle that keeps us sedentary, and the lack of local recreation facilities.

Of all those causes, it's the last one that local government can perhaps most immediately address. For years, Grantsville and Tooele residents have complained about the lack of recreation facilities. In Grantsville, a rusting shed is the town's only indoor recreation center. In the afternoon, its cramped confines are partitioned off into areas for gymnasts, dancers and the local Boys & Girls Club. The roof leaks when it rains, and can be sweltering in summer and bitterly cold in winter. Tooele's counterpart, the Dow James Building, is a windowless fort. It contains two basketball courts that are booked solid during the winter, with many teams from multiple sports who want to practice there being turned away -- and individuals having no hope of using the facility for personal fitness.

Deseret Peak Complex, the recreation center built with mitigation fees from hazardous waste companies, is nice but doesn't represent what Tooele County has become. The biggest sport in the county, by number of participants, is soccer, followed by basketball. Rodeo arenas, motocross courses and chariot tracks serve an extremely small minority of the population, and do very little to make us healthier as a county. The swimming pool is a wonderful lifestyle perk during the summer, but during the long winter months the complex has few attractions for most local residents.

What we need are more courts for the Junior Jazz program -- which is currently packed so tightly into every school in the valley that most teams can't hope of practicing more than an hour a week -- more outdoor and indoor fields for TC United, indoor tennis courts, and a general fitness center with a jogging track and weight room. Those are the types of facilities where kids develop an early love of sports. Without those facilities, our high school athletic programs will continue to lag behind those of more active communities, and our adults will lose the ability to pass on the joys of physical activity to their kids.

Too much money is passing through local government's hands to not make building recreation facilities a priority. And yet, not a single new indoor recreation facility is being planned anywhere in the county. Furthermore, past opportunities to convert the old Tooele High School gym to a public rec center, and to add a rec center to Pratt Aquatic Center, have been squandered.

Unless local government gets serious about funding and building new recreation facilities, it will continue to perpetuate a sedentary culture that will leave the next generation even more overweight than this one.