The Uinta Basin Railway, if built, is expected to triple oil experts from rural northeastern Utah by connecting the remote area to the national rail network. While opponents see the oil-moving railroad as an environmental nightmare in terms of emissions, potential oil spills and effects on wildlife, its supporters say it would transform the local economy and facilitate a domestic energy boom.
In recent months, the project has met a number of obstacles. But the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition, a public partner for the Uinta Basin Railway composed of representatives from oil-rich counties in eastern Utah, isn’t giving up.
On March 4, the group asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review a lower court’s decision that the project’s environmental impact statement and biological opinion were rushed and insufficient.
“Boundless [environmental] review hurts project proponents and the public too,” the filing reads. “The time and expense of environmental review is a barrier to all kinds of new projects — including clean energy projects — that prevents some of them from ever getting off the ground.”
But behind the railway’s legal setbacks looms a larger question: If the project clears regulatory hurdles, who will be funding it?
“It’s gotten to the point where the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition has nothing to show for its effort but failure,” said Deeda Seed, senior campaigner for the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental nonprofit that challenged the Uinta Basin Railway in court.
A video on the Uinta Basin Railway website claims that the project will be “paid for by private industry through mineral lease fees and shipments of freight on the railway.” But so far, public entities have contributed large sums to the project.
Seven County Infrastructure Coalition Executive Director Keith Heaton told a Utah Legislature appropriations subcommittee in January that the group had received approximately $28 million from the state Community Impact Board over four years, but that money was close to drying up.
The Community Impact Board, housed in the Utah Department of Workforce Services, Housing and Community Development Division, funds projects in cities and towns throughout the state impacted by development on public lands. Those cities and towns can’t collect taxes on federal land, making it more difficult to provide sewer, water, transportation, health and public safety services. The Community Impact Board steps in to ease the strain, funded by federal fees returned to the state of Utah for resources developed on federal land.
Heaton, sponsored by Sen. Ron Winterton, R-Roosevelt, asked the Utah Legislature for $750,000 in one-time funding to sustain the coalition in January.
According to disclosure forms, Sen. Winterton is employed by Jones & DeMille Engineering, which has worked on the Uinta Basil Railway project.
The Legislature did not grant Heaton’s request. He acknowledged the setback in a public meeting of the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition last week and said that the group plans to ask the Community Impact Board for more funding.
“We often joke, but it’s not a joke, that [the Community Impact Board] has been the bank of rural Utah,” he said. “There’s limited funding there, and we certainly don’t want to be pigs at the trough.”
The Seven County Infrastructure Coalition did not respond to The Salt Lake Tribune’s request for comment about its recent Supreme Court filing and potential funding for the Uinta Basin Railway.
“The [Community Impact Board], exercising its sole discretion, evaluates and determines the approval of funding applications,” a spokesperson for the Department of Workforce Services, Housing and Community Development Division told The Tribune when asked if the board was considering funding the Uinta Basin Railway project in the future.
The Seven County Infrastructure Coalition wants the highest court in the land to reverse the lower court’s ruling that the project’s environmental review was insufficient.
The railway’s challengers argue that the Surface Transportation Board, which conducted the environmental impact statement, didn’t consider how oil transported on the railway to refineries on the Gulf Coast would affect communities there.
Out of the 7,000 cases that it is asked to review yearly, the Supreme Court usually agrees to hear between 100 and 150 — just 2% of cases.
