Utah Moms for Clean Air

By The Tribune Editorial Board

Sevier subterfuge: County out to foil efforts of its citizens

It seems that since Sevier County officials failed to keep a citizen initiative that they don’t like off the ballot, they’re willing to try subterfuge to make the vote meaningless. At the least, the county attorney and County Commission are engaged in a campaign of aggressive obfuscation apparently aimed at frustrating the democratic right of their con- stituents to have a voice in determining the county’s future health and welfare. The complicated conflict began when a grass-roots group of citizens objected to construction of the Sevier Power Project near Sigurd. The $600 million plant would burn about 940,000 tons of coal per year and spew CO2 and other pollution over the region.

When the County Commission went ahead and approved the plant anyway, the Right to Vote Committee managed to gather more than enough signatures in just over a week to put the proposal on November’s ballot. Their initiative would stop the power plant by revoking the current permit and requiring that voters approve any conditional-use permit for a coal-fired power plant. The group acted quickly, before a constitutionally suspect state law that bans initiatives and referendums on land-use issues went into effect.
At that point, the County Commission members decided not to object to the voter initiative. Instead, they contrived another tack. The initiative as written amends the “conditional-use permit ordinance.” So these public servants labeled the project a “planned-unit development,” which re quires a different kind of permit. Even if voters approve the initiative, it would not block the Sigurd plant. Cute.

The planned-unit development label is ordinarily applied to residential projects that feature clustered housing and ar eas of open space. A power plant is no PUD. A conditional-use permit, on the other hand, is a variance to allow a project to go forward in a zone where it would otherwise be prohibited. Sevier County Attorney Dale Eyre contends that the Sig urd plant was always referred to as a PUD, but an attorney for the citizens group disputes that in a complaint to the Utah Attorney General’s Office, and says he has documents refer ring to a conditional-use permit for the plant. He also says Eyre did not notify the group of the time period when it could contest wording of the initiative.

Even if the county is innocent of skulduggery in this dispute, which seems highly unlikely, it is obviously guilty of standing in the way of citizens exercising their constitution ally protected right to legislate by initiative. That alone pollutes the atmosphere of Sevier County.

Sidenote:
Utah Moms for Clean Air is calling for a moratorium on any NEW coal-fired power plants in Utah. Fortunately, Rocky Mountain Power has gotten the message and has agreed to a 10-year moratrium on new coal (after which they wil re-access the coal climate). However, the power brokers in Sevier County just wont heed the message. The Sevier County Chapter of Utah Moms for Clean Air, along with two other grassroots citizen groups, is working hard to change their minds!!

Pat Bagley’s alternate history of the Salt Lake Valley without the Clean Air Act appeared in today’s Salt Lake Tribue.

• “Imagine the Salt Lake Valley without the Clean Air Act,” Pat Bagley, Salt Lake Tribune, August 12, 2007.

Last week, Utah Moms for Clean Air invited C. Arden Pope III to give an overview of the science on air pollution and health at a meeting held at Westminster College.

C. Arden Pope’s studies began with the question:
Are day-to-day changes in air pollution in Utah’s Wasatch Front associated with changes in lung function, respiratory symptoms, medication use and/or school absences?

The answer: Yes.

Dr. Pope’s work on the subject over the past 20 years included the example of Utah Valley, where scientific study began soon after a group of mothers voiced concerns about their children’s health. What makes the study of Utah Valley so valuable is a period when the valley’s main pollutor, Geneva Steel, shut down for a year and a half. Measures clearly show declines in health effects during this period. The data accumulated.

The Utah Valley studies and many other studies of air pollution show clear effects on health. Dr. Pope illustrated his lecture with images, graphs, and citations that showed not only respiratory effects but cardiopulmonary effects of air pollution.

I overheard the woman in front of me say this information made her want to cry. I felt that way myself. The overwhelming truth of the health effects of the air we allow our children to breathe leaves me stunned. It would be easy to remain stunned and passive, trying to not hear what we’ve come to know from both personal experience and an abundane of scientific data.

But, Utah Moms for Clean Air refuses to remain either stunned or passive. After the fact of health effects from our dirty air, the most important point in Dr. Pope’s presentation was his professional opinion that we can make this change. This isn’t a hope for change but an expectation that we can put our feet on the ground, our hands on the phone, and tell other Utah parents what we know. Utahns can demand the changes necessary to have cleaner air.

• View Dr. Pope’s Power Point presentation.

For an interesting read about the power of mothers to make change in the world, read this article in Orion Magazine. Although focused on “housewives” as activists, as opposed to mothers generally, this is a very interesting take on mothers as a political force.
This line is particularly relevant to our mission:

“This might be the secret of the housewife theory of history: These women take the qualities that are supposed to render them irrelevant and use them defiantly as well as strategically. Starting with what they love, they cut straight through the quicksand of motives and purposes to point out that harm has been done and should be stopped. In some sense, they depoliticize politics, which is what makes them so politically potent.”

Local news stories and publicity about the proposed Mountain View Corridor have cited “recent studies” on the effects of traffic on children’s health.

The health study, published in the professional medical journal The Lancet, reported a 13-year project that followed two groups of Southern California fourth-graders from age 10 to 18, the age when lung development is complete. A group of medical researchers at the University of Southern California wrote the study with assistance from the California Air Resources Board, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Rather than trusting minor mentions, you want to read for yourself the findings of this 13-year major study and make up your mind about the Mountain View Corridor highway. The study was published February 23, 2007, in The Lancet, one of the oldest peer-reviewed medical journals in the world.

Effect of exposure to traffic on lung development from 10 to 18 years of age: a cohort study. The Lancet, Volume 369, Issue 9561, Pages 571-577. W. Gauderman, H. Vora, R. McConnell, K. Berhane, F. Gilliland, D. Thomas, F. Lurmann, E. Avol, N. Kunzli, M. Jerrett.

Read the article:

• The Lancet
• Science Direct
• Utah Moms for Clean Air

This past January, the journal Environmental History published an article by Utahn Ted Moore: “Democratizing the Air: the Salt Lake Women’s Chamber of Commerce and Air Pollution, 1936-1945.”

ABSTRACT: This essay examines challenges by the Salt Lake Women’s Chamber of Commerce of definitions of conservation, democracy, and the role of the city through the group’s efforts to enact air pollution reforms from 1936 to 1945 - a time and a place that generally are seen as less than willing to offer women a significant public voice. The Women’s Chamber served as a transitional group between pre- and postwar conservationism and environmentalism, suggesting that this period deserves more scholarly study. The case study also advances the links between urban and environmental history.

The original article includes shocking photos of smog and inversions apparently even worse than those we experience now.

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