This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2008, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Elaine Bonavita wants to put the future of a proposed coal-fired power plant on Sevier County's November ballot.
A veteran of local politics elsewhere, the Salina newcomer has started a campaign to give her rural Utah neighbors a voice on the 270-megawatt electric plant that has been slogging through the state and local bureaucracy for seven years.
As she sees it, the only way to heal the rift the power plant has cut in the community is to let people vote on it. She has already started an initiative petition campaign through her group "The Right to Vote Committee."
"I just organize and do what needs to be done," said Bonavita.
She asked the three-member County Commission last week to delay a vote on the plant's conditional use permit until after the people have spoken. But the commissioners declined.
Bonavita, who settled in Salina six months ago, after serving a six-year mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Tonga, said she expects interest to pick up next week. She'll be collecting signatures at public hearings Tuesday and Wednesday, during the County Commission's public hearings on the conditional use permit.
Is she for the plant, or against it? "We believe in the people's right to vote, whatever their position is," said Bonavita, a key figure in the 1980 tax reform initiative in Massachusetts and later in Iowa's anti-abortion campaign.
The proposed Sevier Power Co. plant would be built between Interstate 70 and the patchwork farmlands of Sigurd. It would supply enough electricity for about 135,000 homes, but many locals and environmentalists say its smokestack emissions would foul the air and damage health.
Co-owner Bruce Taylor doubted that the initiative campaign would have much impact on his project. "That's not the process," he said.
Taylor's group remains committed to the plant, although it has already endured one appeal by the Sevier Citizens for Clean Air and Water, two trips to appeals court and a visit to the Utah Supreme Court. Its state-issued air pollution permit currently faces a Utah Court of Appeals review at the request of the Utah chapter of the Sierra Club.
He noted that electric plants typically face 12 years of licencing and appeals. Controversy, he says, is "a normal part of the process."