The courts have dealt the Uinta Basin Railway several blows in recent months, but Utah’s oil-producing counties aren’t giving up on the project. On Wednesday, its backers said they want to take the battle to the highest court in the land — and asked for $750,000 from the general fund to do so.
“This treads all over states’ rights and interstate commerce,” Keith Heaton, executive director of the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition, told an appropriations subcommittee on Wednesday. The coalition, which represents seven counties in eastern Utah, is the public partner for the oil-moving railroad.
“We think we have a very good case before the Supreme Court,” he continued.
The Uinta Basin Railway would connect Utah’s remote, oil-rich Uinta Basin to the broader rail network, including an existing rail line that runs along the Colorado River. By making it easier for the region’s waxy crude oil to reach refineries on the Gulf Coast, the railroad would triple oil exports from the Uinta Basin.
Many of the Uinta Basin’s top oil producers are located out of state. For example, Finley Resources, the company that also owns the state’s busiest oil terminal outside of Helper, Utah, is owned by Jim Finley from Houston, Texas.
In August, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit denied approval for the railway, ruling that federal agencies didn’t properly consider the project’s environmental impacts. Specifically, the court ruled that they did not properly consider the railway’s upstream and downstream impacts (including impacts on Gulf Coast communities), wildfire risk, local accident risk and ambiguous financial resources.
The Seven County Infrastructure Coalition asked the court to rehear the case in December. The court rejected that request.
The project took another punch in January when the U.S. Forest Service withdrew a permit that would have allowed the railway to cross through Ashley National Forest in northeastern Utah.
Before the Infrastructure and General Government Appropriations Subcommittee on Wednesday, sponsored by Sen. Ronald Winterton, R-Roosevelt, Heaton said the judicial decisions were handed down by a “liberal Washington court.”
The $750,000 requested from the Legislature, according to Heaton, would “bridge the gap” from their Community Impact Board funding, which is about to run dry. That previous funding amounted to over $28 million.
“They’re digging the hole deeper in terms of burdening taxpayers with the costs of this project that is intended to benefit private industry, and everyone should have a huge problem with that,” said Deeda Seed, senior campaigner for the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental nonprofit that challenged the Uinta Basin Railway in court.
“We have these huge, pressing issues that need to be funded, and the Uinta Basin Railway is not one of them,” Seed told The Tribune. “It’s more money down the drain, frankly.”
Colorado’s elected officials and environmental groups celebrated the railway’s setbacks after expressing fears that a derailment would endanger the Colorado River and local communities.
The Seven County Infrastructure Coalition did not respond to The Tribune’s additional request for comment.
