Determination to stop more pollution from being pumped into their skies appeared to galvanize Davis County residents Thursday against a new industrial power plant planned for West Bountiful.

"What can we really do?" asked Bountiful doctor Clark Hilbig to neighbors jammed into a Woods Cross meeting room. "We have to make laws. We have to raise a stink. ... How do we stop this rather than just talking about it?"

The first step, agreed many of the nearly 200 assembled, is to raise their concerns with state regulators at a public hearing on the plant Tuesday.

The Division of Air Quality says it intends to give Consolidated Energy Systems LLC a pollution permit for a 109-megawatt power plant at 400 S. 1100 West, West Bountiful. The plant would produce power for the adjacent Holly Refinery and use "dirtier-than-coal" waste petroleum from the refinery as fuel.

Consolidated will compensate for the dirty fuel by using a robust, five-stage pollution-control system -- a system that helps keep the plant well within state and federal pollution restrictions and gives state regulators no grounds to reject the permit.

Locals still don't want the plant. And West Bountiful Mayor James Behunin publicly doubted this week whether his community would be willing to grant the building permit and rezoning that would be needed to accommodate the plant.

Opposition strengthened at Thursday night's meeting, an information session hosted by the Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment on the plant's potential health impacts.

Members of the doctors' group shared their estimate that 20 people a year would die prematurely because of the plant's emissions if it were to be built. They told how children would suffer numerous respiratory and neurological risks because of the hazardous heavy metals and other toxic pollutants the plant will release into the air.

Brian Moench, founder and president of the doctors' group, urged people to contact their lawmakers and help change the law to allow health issues to be accounted for in future permit decisions. He compared allowing the proposed plant to forcing everyone in proximity to breathe secondhand cigarette smoke.

"We have a moral responsibility to our children," he said, "not to allow Bountiful and Woods Cross to become one big ashtray."

An engineer who has worked on the proposal, David A. Kopta, pointed to state documents that showed emissions from the new plant would be around one-third of one percent of the regulated air pollution in Davis County.

"People who are concerned about air quality should focus on mobile sources, cars and trucks," he said. "That's where they'll get the biggest bang for their buck. This [plant] isn't going to be that bad of a problem."

But Woods Cross resident Julie Checketts, a mother who recently suffered an unexplained miscarriage, challenged the idea the harm was negligible.

"Add another" pollution source? she asked him. "That's ridiculous."

Checketts and her girls-night-out group plan to caravan to next Tuesday's public hearing.