Primary sources
Documents and Press
Everything this history rests on, and an honest account of what has not been tracked down yet.
The primary sources for this history. Court opinions and agency records are the load-bearing citations. News coverage is listed chronologically.
Court opinions
Utah Chapter of Sierra Club v. Utah Air Quality Board
Decided November 21, 2006 (No. 20050455). The standing decision. The Utah Supreme Court reversed the Air Quality Board’s denial of standing to the Sierra Club and the Grand Canyon Trust, and clarified Utah standing law for environmental organizations.
Text verifiedText verified against the published opinion. Official PDF still wanted.
Sevier Power Co. v. Hansen
Decided October 17, 2008, following an order issued from the bench on October 8. Sevier Power sued to keep Proposition One off the ballot and won in district court. The Utah Supreme Court reversed and struck down the section of the Utah Election Code barring citizen initiatives on land use questions. The broadest of the decisions this campaign produced, and the least known.
Text verifiedText verified against the published opinion. Official PDF still wanted.
Utah Chapter of the Sierra Club v. Air Quality Board
Decided December 4, 2009. Affirmed in part and reversed in part: affirmed on carbon dioxide and BACT, reversed on the failure to consider IGCC and on the nitrogen-oxide limit of 0.1 pounds per million BTU.
Text verifiedText verified against the published opinion. Official PDF still wanted.
Kennon v. Air Quality Board
Decided December 4, 2009. Opinion by Chief Justice Christine Durham, joined by Associate Chief Justice Durrant and Justices Wilkins, Parrish, and Nehring. Full caption: James O. Kennon, and Dick Cumiskey, members of Save Our Air & Resources (SOAR), Petitioners, v. Air Quality Board and Sevier Power Company, Respondents. Held that the Division misapplied R307-401-11, that an open-ended extension without a new construction deadline was irrational, and that the claimed eighteen-month review was not supported by substantial evidence. Contains the Post-it note passage at paragraph 28.
Text verifiedText located and paragraph 28 verified word for word against the published opinion. Official PDF still to be obtained from the Utah courts and hosted here.
Sevier Citizens for Clean Air and Water, Inc. v. Department of Environmental Quality
Utah Court of Appeals, decided October 30, 2014. Opinion by Judge Stephen L. Roth, with Judges Gregory K. Orme and Judith M. Billings concurring. Affirmed dismissal of SCCAW’s challenge to the natural gas permit for failure to demonstrate a substantial legal interest.
Text verifiedText verified against the published opinion. Official PDF still wanted.
Agency and county records
Approval order, Utah Division of Air Quality
Thirteen pages, signed by Executive Secretary Richard W. Sprott. Project engineer John Jenks, the same engineer who would prepare the gas plant Intent to Approve eight years later. Covers a 270-megawatt circulating fluidized bed coal plant near Sigurd, in an attainment area, as a new major PSD source. This is the document that settles the campaign’s numbers. It requires a stack “at least 460 feet in height,” caps coal at 1,000,000 tons a year and 2,700 tons a day, and sets emission limits by rate: carbon monoxide 292 pounds per hour, nitrogen oxides 0.1 pounds per million BTU on a 24-hour average, sulfur dioxide 0.05 pounds per million BTU on 24 hours and 0.022 on 30 days, particulates 39 pounds per hour, mercury 0.0000004 pounds per million BTU.
In handIn hand. Recovered from an archived copy of the Division's website.
Intent to Approve, Utah Division of Air Quality
Sixteen pages. The state’s intent to permit the 580-megawatt combined cycle natural gas plant near Sigurd. Prepared by engineer John Jenks, signed by New Source Review Section manager Martin D. Gray. Source of the permitted emissions figures and the 165-foot stack height on The Gas Plant Chapter.
In handIn hand. Recovered from SCCAW's own website, ready to host.
Utah Air Quality Board order
Memorializes the Board’s rulings upholding the permit. The order appealed in both 2009 cases. Also the authoritative source for the fall 2007 hearing dates.
Not yet obtainedTo be obtained.
State property rights Advisory Opinion No. 65
Concluded that Sevier Power held a vested right to have its December 2007 conditional-use application judged under the ordinances in effect before Proposition One.
Not yet obtainedTo be obtained.
Sevier County records
Planning Commission concept approval, July 12, 2006. Preliminary conditional-use approval, December 12, 2007 (3 to 2). Application deemed complete, December 19, 2007. Commission action placing the initiative on the ballot, July 7, 2008. Certified results of Proposition One, November 4, 2008.
To requestTo be requested from the county clerk and planning office.
Requests for Agency Action
SCCAW, filed November 1, 2004. Sierra Club and Grand Canyon Trust, filed November 12, 2004.
Not yet obtainedTo be obtained, likely through the DEQ administrative record.
SCCAW's own record
The organization’s website, 2011 to 2015
SCCAW published seventeen pages and twenty-two posts to seviercitizensforcleanairandwater.org between September 2011 and October 2015, including meeting summaries, the text of a Richfield Reaper announcement, and two lengthy first-person accounts by Dick Cumiskey of the gas plant appeal. It is the only contemporaneous record of the group’s work after the coal fight ended. Two 2011 posts on that site date the coal ruling to January 2009. The published opinion is dated December 4, 2009. The posts are preserved as written, error included.
In handFully archived on 29 August 2026 and republished here. See the Archive.
Campaign records
Materials held by former members that belong in this archive if they still exist: petition sheets from the spring 2008 Right to Vote drive, letters to the editor of the Richfield Reaper, hearing sign-in sheets and testimony, photographs from county meetings, and the group’s own correspondence with the Division of Air Quality.
News coverage
December 22, 2003
High Country News, “King coal is back,” by Tim Westby. The earliest major feature. Quotes Sigurd resident Jadie Houchin and describes SCCAW as newly formed. Source of the emissions figures and the 2008 target opening date.
March 1, 2004
Deseret News, “Say no to coal-fired plant” (letter to the editor).
November 18, 2004
Deseret News, “Environmentalists Seek to Block Two Coal-Fired Plants.”
September 25, 2007
Richfield Reaper, “Power Plant Emits More Controversy.”
November 8, 2007
Salt Lake Tribune, “State Board Upholds Permit for Coal-Fired Power Plant.”
December 13, 2007
Deseret Morning News and KSL, via Associated Press, “Coal Power Plant Proposal in Sigurd Wins Zoning OK.” Quotes Dick Cumiskey and Shaunna Bastian.
September 1, 2008
Deseret News, “Power company wants Sevier County initiative nixed.”
November 5, 2008
Salt Lake Tribune, “Sevier backs coal-plant measure.” Associated Press, “Utah county voters pass measure on coal plants.”
November 11, 2008
Salt Lake Tribune, “Utah Coal-Fired Power-Plant Debate Not Over.” Finlinson dismisses the significance of the vote; Kennon says the group is one step from doing away with the plant.
December 4, 2009
Associated Press and Deseret News, “Utah Supreme Court rules against coal power plant.”
December 2009
Sierra Club Scrapbook, “First-Time Organizer Helps Beat Back Utah Coal Plant.”
Winter 2010
Utah Sierran, Vol. 43 No. 1.
November 12, 2012
Sun Advocate, by Dave Anderson, “Sevier County natural gas power plant clears state regulatory hurdle.”
October 31, 2014
Fox 13 (KSTU), by Ben Winslow, “Court rejects petition to stop gas-fired plant in Sevier Co.”
A note on sources
Several of the local citations above, particularly the Richfield Reaper and Sun Advocate items, are known through secondary indexes rather than from the original printed pages. Dates and headlines are recorded here as indexed and should be treated as provisional until checked against the originals.
The stack height and the emission limits are now taken from the 2004 approval order itself rather than from campaign-era reporting. The annual tonnage figures that circulated during the campaign are the order’s own hourly and heat-input limits annualised, and the site says so where they appear.