Sigurd, Utah. 2001 to 2009.
A coal plant was coming to the valley. It never got built.
Sevier Citizens for Clean Air and Water spent eight years fighting a 270-megawatt coal-fired power plant proposed for farmland near Sigurd. Two of its members argued the case themselves, without lawyers, and won at the Utah Supreme Court.
Read what happened at the Supreme CourtSee the full timeline
Sevier Valley farmland. Photograph published by Sevier Citizens for Clean Air and Water, 2011.
In 2001, a Bountiful company called NEVCO Energy proposed building a 270-megawatt coal-fired power plant on roughly 350 acres of farmland near Sigurd, in the narrow central Utah valley that also holds Richfield. It was a merchant plant, built to sell power on the open market rather than to serve the county. The pollution would stay here. Sevier County residents began organizing against it, formed Sevier Citizens for Clean Air and Water, and started showing up: at county commission meetings, at planning and zoning hearings, in the letters column of the Richfield Reaper. Over the next eight years the group grew into a coalition with the Utah Chapter of the Sierra Club, the Grand Canyon Trust, Western Resource Advocates, Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment, and Utah Moms for Clean Air. It ran a countywide ballot initiative. It filed administrative challenges. And on December 4, 2009, it won.
The Utah Supreme Court overturned the plant’s air permit in two companion rulings issued the same day. The coal plant was never built. Two miles west of where it would have stood, the 80-megawatt Sigurd Solar farm began commercial operation on May 1, 2021.
The Post-it note
The permit died in part because of a piece of paper roughly three inches square.
Utah’s rules required the Division of Air Quality to review a Prevention of Significant Deterioration permit if construction had not begun within eighteen months. Construction on the Sevier plant never began. When the Division was asked to produce evidence that the review had actually taken place, what it produced was a photocopy of a Post-it note reading:
The Court was not persuaded. From the opinion in Kennon v. Air Quality Board, 2009 UT 77, paragraph 28:
Utah Supreme Court, December 4, 2009
A record limited to a Post-it note indicating that someone was contacted regarding a review is woefully inadequate to convince a reasonable person that a review took place.
The two men who made that argument to the Court, Dick Cumiskey and Jim Kennon, were not attorneys. They wrote their own briefs and stood up in the courtroom themselves. Kennon died before 2011, less than two years after the ruling.
When we founded Sevier Citizens for Clean Air and Water in 2001, you didn't mention the Sierra Club around here.Jim Kennon, SCCAW co-founder, December 2009