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Show The Park Record A-18 Meetings and agendas Sat/Sun/Mon/Tues, May 14-17, 2016 More Dogs on Main By Tom Clyde to publish your public notices and agendas please email classifieds@parkrecord.com Another transit center Four Council Dinner Meeting AGENDA Four Council Dinner Meeting: Summit County Council, Park City Council, Wasatch County Council, and Heber City Council Monday, May 16, 2016, 6:00 p.m. NOTICE is hereby given that the Summit County Council, Park City Council, Wasatch County Council, and Heber City Council will meet Monday, May 16, 2016, at 6:00 p.m. at the DeJoria Center, Willow Room, 970 UT-32, Kamas, Utah 84036 Welcome and introduction by Roger Armstrong, Summit County Council Chair Dining and social time Icebreaker exercise; Craig Sanchez, Public Affairs, Park City Update on Mayflower development; Mike Davis, Wasatch County Manager Date and host for next meeting SUMMIT COUNTY COUNCIL OF GOVERNMENTS SUMMIT COUNTY COUNCIL OF GOVERNMENTS (COG) will meet Tuesday, May 17, 2016 Summit County Courthouse Conference Room 2 60 N. Main Street, Coalville, UT 7:00 p.m. AGENDA All times listed are general in nature and are subject to change by the Chair. ITEMS *Public comment may or may not be taken* Emergency Management Update -Chris Crowley (10 min.) Transportation Update - Derrick Radke, Caroline Ferris and Matt Leavitt Other items Next meeting: August 16, 2016 Individuals with questions, comments, or needing special accommodations pursuant to the Americans with Disabilities Act regarding this meeting may contact the Community Development Department, (435) 336-3126. SNYDERVILLE BASIN WATER RECLAMATION DISTRICT SNYDERVILLE BASIN WATER RECLAMATION DISTRICT BOARD OF TRUSTEES MEETING AGENDA May 16, 2016 ** District Office** 5:00 p.m. I. CALL TO ORDER II. CONSENT AGENDA - Approval of Board Meeting Minutes for April 18, 2016 III. PUBLIC INPUT IV. SERVICE AWARD - Dustin Lewis 10 years V. APPROVAL OF EXPENDITURES - Bills in the Amount of $1,098,752.40 Including SCWRF Project Pay Request #1 for $375,740.20 VI. SUBDIVISION PROJECTS Quarry Springs - 68 REs 370 & 380 Crestview Dr. - 2 REs Estimated LEA REs Year to Date: # Above Splitter 87.60; # ECWRF 0; # SCWRF 0; Total 87.60 Proposed this Meeting: # Above Splitter 0; # ECWRF 70; # SCWRF 0; Total 70 VII. DISTRICT MANAGER Discussion Items - Update on SCWRF Project Action Items Consider approval of SCWRF Pay Request #1 Consider approval of Annual Financial Report (CAFR) Information Item Financial Statement Impact Fee Report Trust Accountability Program (TAP) VIII. FUTURE AGENDA ITEMS Projects Operations Finance Governmental Matters IV. ADJOURN If you are planning to attend this public meeting and, due to a disability, require reasonable accommodation in understanding, participating in or attending the meeting, please notify the District twenty-four or more hours in advance of the meeting, and we will try to provide whatever assistance may be required. Docs unsure how to comply with Utah fetal pain law Say wording of new guidelines is too vague Michelle L. Price and Hallie Golden Associated Press SALT LAKE CITY - Utah's first-in-the-nation requirement that fetuses receive anesthesia or painkillers before some abortions takes effect Tuesday, but doctors say it's unnecessary and impossible to comply with. The law requires pain relief for a fetus before any abortion at 20 weeks of gestation or later, based on the disputed premise that a fetus can feel pain at that stage. Doctors say such pain relief is futile, and there is no science or medicine laying out how they're supposed to administer it. "The pain doesn't exist, so I can't make it go away," said David Turok of the University of Utah's obstetrics and gynecology department. They hope the steps they already take to alleviate a woman's pain during an abortion will be enough to satisfy the law. The governor signed the measure this year after lawmakers argued the possibility of a fetus in distress made it important to act. "If a child can experience pain, we have an obligation to protect that child," said Republican state Sen. Curt Bramble, who sponsored the law. No legal challenge has been filed over the law, but abortion providers and abortion-rights activists say that might be because no patient attempting to have an abortion has been forced to undergo some new kind of anesthesia or painkilling treatment. Women undergoing an abortion after 20 weeks usually have at least moderate sedation, but there's no science or medical standard for eliminating pain felt by a fetus, said Leah Torres, a Salt Lake City obstetrician-gynecologist. Torres went to legislators, the governor's office and the attorney general's office seeking an explanation on what treatment she's supposed to give under the new law. She said they recommended she consult an attorney. "I have no choice but to cross my fingers and hope that what I'm doing already is in compliance, because I don't know what they're talking about," she said. Bramble said it's not the Legislature's job to tell a doctor how to comply with the law, which would apply to less than 1 percent of all abortions performed in the state. "We don't tell a general contractor how to build a house, but we tell them what the standards are if they're going to build a house," he said. Bramble originally sought to ban all abortions after 20 weeks but abandoned the idea after legislative attorneys warned him it would likely be unconstitutional. Courts across the U.S. have ruled that under the U.S. Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling, women have a constitutionally protected right to terminate a pregnancy before a fetus is able to survive outside the womb, generally around 24 weeks of pregnancy. Doctors with the Planned Parenthood Association of Utah think they can safely offer women pain relief without risking their health or curtailing their ability to have an abortion, so it wasn't worth the time, money and effort to challenge the law in court, said organization CEO Karrie Galloway. "It's a bogus law," Galloway said. "I'm sorry about it, but I can't take on every silly thing that people do." The law does not apply to abortions performed to save the mother's life; abortions where the fetus has a defect that two doctors agree is lethal; or abortions where two doctors agree that giving a woman anesthesia or painkillers would risk her life or cause critical health problems. No other U.S. state has such as law, according to the nonprofit abortion-rights group Guttmacher Institute. Montana lawmakers passed a similar measure in 2015, but the state's Democratic governor vetoed it. Utah already had a law on the books giving women the option of anesthesia or painkillers for a fetus before any abortion after 20 weeks. There's no data on how many women opted for it or how it was administered. President of Pro-Life Utah Mary Taylor supports the law but said she would have preferred it banned abortions beginning at the point when a fetus feels pain, which she thinks is earlier than 20 weeks. "We do believe it has opened up a discussion and maybe promoted some awareness into the subject of fetal pain," Taylor said. "That would be the biggest benefit." VOTE TODAY! eop 0 le's Choice 2 1 6 Th eP The 2016 "Park City's Best" Survey is now open! Recognize the best in our community with your Votes. Vote now through the end of May. T o ta k e s u r v e y, v i s i t: pa r k r e c o r d . c o m Summit County is set to break ground on the new Kimball Junction Transit Center. It is next to the Sheldon Richins building. The new facility will have parking for 10 buses, and some lovely plaza areas around it that could be nice if hanging out at the transit center is your thing. Used in conjunction with the adjacent library, the plaza might make sense. The idea is to have a place where several local bus routes come together so that passengers can transfer to an express bus to get into Park City or, I guess, to the ski areas. The theory is that buses can make shorter, more frequent loops around Kimball Junction neighborhoods, and get people to the Transit Center more quickly than a route that takes a circuitous path through the greater Snyderville area, miles out of your way, before actually going toward the destination. The County also said they hope it will intercept drivers coming from Salt Lake, who will park at the transit center and ride the bus the rest of the way into town. The original plan had parking for 25 cars. The new plan has been revised to have a "few" more, maybe upwards of 35 or 40 parking spaces to intercept all that traffic coming up from Salt Lake. Well, that problem is solved. The project will cost an estimated $2.5 million, with $1.7 million of that coming from the Feds. The County already owned the land, and the City is contributing some, too. So for what it is, the cost seems almost reasonable by local standards. A Park Meadows remodel. For the rest of the world, spending $2.5 million (plus the land value) on a deluxe bus stop is perhaps a little rich. But if it intercepts all 40 cars coming from Salt Lake and puts them on the bus, thus solving our traffic problems, well, go for it. Meanwhile, not to be out- done, the City has purchased about 3 acres of land along Homestake Road for six million bucks. The plans for that have not been fully defined, but it probably will involve housing, parking, transit, and a flamingo sanctuary. The main idea is transit, so you can ride a regular bus from your house to the Homestake Road transit center, and then take an express bus to the Kimball Transit Center, where you could transfer to another bus that would take you to the Swede Alley transit center. There have been ideas floating around about some kind of gondola system that could It feels like we are spending a whole lot of money on transit without a clear understanding of what a coherent system would look like." be based at that location. You could drive and park there (the City is looking at more than 40 spaces), and then, through some engineering miracle that has yet to be explained, take a gondola from there to the Park City Resort base. That will surely delight the dozens of property owners whose yards, roofs, and second story windows would be underneath the straight line route the gondola would need to follow. While it could happen, and might actually be kind of cool (especially compared to riding the bus), the right of way issues seem more than a little daunting. There are no cost estimates on that one, beyond the $6 million to buy the land. A group is moving ahead with the Hyperloop system. They tested it in Nevada this week. It will move people around at 700 miles an hour in a pneumatic tube. The trip to Salt Lake would take 3 minutes. Extracting your pancreas from your sinuses would take a few minutes longer. Maybe the Hyperloop would terminate in the Homestake Road transit center. Years ago, it was the Union Pacific "wye" where they turned the locomotives around. It feels like we are spending a whole lot of money on transit without a clear understanding of what a coherent system would look like. It will take dramatic cultural changes before Westerners will adopt mass transit. Intercepting 35 cars at the County's most dysfunctional intersection seems to leave some gaps. Still, our spending is modest compared to some. The town of McKinney, Texas, is spending $62.8 million to build a new high school football stadium. McKinney, a suburb of Dallas, with a population of 132,000, just approved a school bond for a total of $220 million. It includes an auditorium on one school, a couple of junior high band rooms, and other stuff. $62.8 million of it will go to a football stadium. The old facility could seat 7,000 people. For a high school football game. Texas is apparently a very strange place. The new facility will seat 12,000 people. The stadium will be used by several high schools in the district, not just one. Well, when you put it that way-- $62 million on high school football seems almost necessary. But will it have a transit center? Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986. Writers on the Range By Wendy Beye End of coal is bringing a wrenching transition When I was living in lush western Montana in the mid1960s, fresh out of college, I jumped on the anti-coal bandwagon. A greasy black haze from coal-fired heating stoves hung in the Missoula Valley during winter air inversions, and my friends and I campaigned for countywide cleanair regulations that prohibited coal burning. We bemoaned the trains hauling 100 railcars piled high with coal that passed through Missoula on their way to Pacific Coast depots, bound for shipment overseas. We believed that our local electricity, supplied by the now-defunct Montana Power Company, was generated using "clean" hydroelectric facilities on the Columbia and Missouri rivers. Now, 45 years later, the world has turned against electricity generated by coalfired plants in hopes of slowing down the warming of our planet. Yet I'm feeling anything but gleeful. My feelings are very much mixed. I live in a small community in eastern Montana that has come to depend upon the Signal Peak coal mine for its economic health. The underground mine is our economic bedrock: It will pay about 30 percent of the total taxes collected in our county this year. Over the past eight years, its high-paying jobs have raised per capita wages in the community by about 13 percent, more than twice the state average. Closure of our coal mine would wreak havoc on our county and city. A similar situation exists in the town of Colstrip, Montana, which has depended on the operation of four huge, coal-fired generating plants since the mid-1970s. A nearby open-pit coal mine supplies the coal for the generating plants. About 730 residents are employed in coal-related jobs, with pay averaging $66,000 a year, well above Montana's median annual wage of $46,230. The plants and mine also pay 77 percent of the property taxes collected in the county, and 85 percent of the taxes collected in the city. Residents who love life in their small community of Colstrip have been fierce in their efforts to protect coal-fired electricity and their future. Meanwhile, several recent decisions - some made by the state legislatures in Washington and Oregon - have smacked the coal industry hard in Montana. Four electric companies that own shares in the Colstrip generating plants push power into the Bonneville Power Administration If coal operations are curtailed in response to the EPA's Clean Air Act regulations, more than 7,000 jobs in Montana will disappear. that serves large coastal communities. But because of state regulations aimed at reducing dependence on electricity generated by coal, those companies are being encouraged through power rate incentives to close their Montana plants earlier than anticipated. Housing prices in Colstrip have already declined in anticipation of the community's demise. Closer to home, the Montana Board of Environmental Review refused to concur in the issuance of a permit to expand the Signal Peak Mine. This occurred after the Montana Environmental Information Council filed an objection to the Cumulative Hydrologic Impact Assessment written by Montana's Department of Environmental Quality. Because the permit is in limbo, mine owners are reluctant to do the preparatory work necessary to move longwall machinery, even though leases have been in place for several years. Another blow to coal came in mid-March when a district court judge declared the permit "void" for releasing wastewater from the Rosebud mine near Colstrip. The permit had been challenged by the Montana Environmental Information Council. If the permits for the two mines are not issued soon, work will stop, and employees will be laid off. Constraining coal means a world of hurt economically, according to a report issued by the University of Montana's Bureau of Business and Economic Research. If coal operations are curtailed in response to the EPA's Clean Air Act regulations, more than 7,000 jobs in Montana will disappear, with eastern Montana's rural counties taking the brunt of the blow. I've always considered myself to be an environmentalist. I've taken stands against timber clear-cutting, statesponsored wolf kills, livestock fencing that kills ungulates and birds, air pollution caused by industrial operations, and water pollution caused by mining Montana's resources. Now, I'm torn between good environmental intentions and the wellbeing of my neighbors. Too often, the human costs of doing what's right for our Earth are not considered as part of the equation. Is it too much to ask that the folks on both sides of the issue sit down together and work out a longrange plan to soften the human consequences of reducing our nation's carbon footprint? Wendy Beye is a contributor to Writers on the Range, an opinion service of High Country News (hcn.org). She lives and writes in Roundup, Montana. |