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Regulating greenhouse gases Utah Supreme Court to wade into coal-fired power plant fight By Judy Fahys
The Salt Lake Tribune Article Launched: 10/10/2008 02:21:03 AM MDT The national fight over coal-fired power plants played out Thursday in Utah's highest court.
Justices heard oral arguments on two cases intended to force the Sevier Power Co. to use the toughest pollution-control technology available for the 270-megawatt electricity-generating station planned for Sigurd.
The legal sparring came the day after the justices issued an emergency order that allowed Sevier County residents to vote on the plant in the Nov. 4 election.
Both the outcome of the vote and the justices' decisions in Thursday's cases could cause even longer delays for the $600 million power plant, which received its state air-pollution license four years ago.
"It's not a very comfortable place to be," said company spokesman Fred Finlinson, whose company insists it is planning to use the cleanest technology available.
For Jim Kennon and Dick Cuminsky, the Sevier County residents who argued the first of Thursday's two cases, the Supreme Court's attention was both logical and timely.
They have been fighting plans for the plant in their rural valley since first hearing about it eight years ago. And, on Thursday, the nonlawyer duo told the justices the state Division of Air Quality had illegally extended the company's license.
"Actually, I agreed with everything they [the justices] said," Kennon said afterward, "and what could be better than that?"
Joro Walker, an attorney for the Utah Chapter of the Sierra Club, noted that the case is one of several in state courts to take up the question of whether greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide should be regulated as a pollutant, as a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court case directed.
While the Bush administration has balked at this requirement on a national level, courts in several states - among them Kansas, Colorado and Georgia - have considered cases in recent months that address the relationship between coal-fired plants and climate change. The results have been mixed.
Walker said the Utah Supreme Court would be the first state high court to weigh in on the national debate about the necessity of regulating greenhouse gasses.
The lack of carbon dioxide regulation is one of six key faults the Sierra Club is highlighting in its appeal of the state permit. Ultimately, the case comes down to making sure state regulators do all they can to protect Utah's air quality, Walker said.
"This stuff really matters," she said. "And it's up to the state to protect us."
Rick Sprott, director of Utah's Department of Environmental Quality and head of the division of air quality at the time the Sevier Power plant received its permit, said the justices' questions and the cases themselves were indications of how complicated air-quality regulations are and how difficult they are to implement.
Plus, he added, "coal plants are very controversial."
Back in Sevier County late Wednesday, planning commissioners put off a vote on a new disposal site for the plant's coal waste.
Environmentalists and critics of the plant in the community have been raising concerns about the disposal site, about 118 acres off state Route 24. They say local water and air would be at risk from pollution by heavy metals, radioactive contaminants and other hazardous wastes if the site is built.
But it was a postponement request by the state School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration, which owns mineral rights under the proposed disposal site and land surrounding it, that caused planning commissioners to put off a vote.
fahys@sltrib.com
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