Ol' Orrin is fixin' to stuff language into the transportation appropriations bill that would make an
end run around settlement negotiations between environmentalists and road developers.
Details in the flip.
The Legacy Highway is a planned highway route from Davis and Weber Counties to Salt Lake City. Davis and Weber are north of Salt Lake, and are home to hundreds of thousands of daily commuters in the city.
I-15 is truly getting too full to accommodate the traffic. But the main objection to the Legacy Highway is the fact that the brilliant folks at the Army Corps of Engineers decided to make the Highway go through wetlands of the Great Salt Lake, endangering waterfowl like the Great Blue Heron.
In 2001, the 10th Circuit held that the environmental impact statement (EIS) was woefully inadequate. A new EIS is due out soon. Yet Utah senior U.S. Senator said,
"The Legacy Parkway project is critical for Davis County, and really, it's vital for our entire state that we complete construction," Hatch said in a statement late Wednesday. "These unnecessary delays have cost Utah $220 million . . . and Utah officials have bent over backwards to address the environmental concerns."
SLC Mayor Rocky Anderson thinks it isn't unnecessary and all the environmentalists involved in the settlement negotiations (there has been several court battles) aren't talking because they don't want to undermine the progress they have made. I don't believe that environmental goals and economic development are diametrically opposed. The fact that both sides are talking means they both agree that there needs to be a way for more people to get into SLC without unnecessarily harming the ecosystem. For example, light rail is being developed for the entire Valley, stretching from Odgen in Weber County to Provo in Utah County. Of course, that won't happen until 2012 or so, but even if they broke ground tomorrow on the highway, it still wouldn't be finished until 2008.
This isn't the first time Hatch has done the bidding of developers over the objections of normal legal action or environmental standards:
Congress has used this method before, most recently to clear construction of a highway segment in Hawaii and to secure the right-of-way for the Trans-Alaska Pipeline system, [Sen.] Bennett said. In fact, Hatch pushed through environmental exemptions for oil magnate Earl Holding for a road to his Snowbasin ski resort in the runup to the Olympics.
Holding also owns Sun Valley, the summer and ski resort in Idaho near where the Kerry's have a house (in Ketchem).
Write your Senators to tell them to stop Hatch's end run around the court process and to let the whole thing take its course.