Taxpayers may soon find themselves footing a legal tab of up to $1 million for attorneys who successfully fought state laws to derail the project.
The Legislative Management Committee is slated to consider a settlement today between the state and Skull Valley Band of Goshutes, which was to host the waste, and Private Fuel Storage, a consortium of nuclear reactor companies planning to build and operate the storage site. Although the exact amount is a secret, the panel of legislative leaders is only authorized to approve settlements between $500,000 and $1 million.
As the state was poised to wrap up that case, it filed its opening brief Monday in Washington to have the waste project's federal nuclear license struck down.
Utah Department of Environmental Quality Director Dianne Nielson said the state is going forward with the appeal despite two Interior Department rulings in September that effectively kill the waste project. She said Utah needs to make it clear that it does not accept the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's decision to give the waste site a license.
"We've seen situations where those decisions come back to get us," she said.
Then-Gov. Mike Leavitt and the Legislature tried to head off the project back in 2001, with a trio of tough laws that banned high-level nuclear waste and, if the site went forward, required $150 billion cash as accident insurance and a 75 percent tax on any individual or company providing goods or services to the project.
Those, coupled with two earlier laws, were the target of a lawsuit brought soon after by the tribe and the consortium. Utah U.S. District Court Judge Tena Campbell declared the laws unconstitutional, and her decision was validated by a Denver appeals court.
The U.S. Supreme Court declined to take up the case last December. The state balked in February when it received a bill for legal fees totaling $1.3 million.
Tim Vollmann, an attorney for the 123-member Skull Valley Goshutes, would not disclose the settlement amount. Had the project gone forward, his clients might have made hundreds of millions of dollars by allowing their reservation in Tooele County to serve as a long-term parking lot for up to 44,000 tons of used reactor fuel.
State attorneys and legislative staff have said they have no list of past state settlements for comparison. But among those publicly reported in recent years was a payment of about $400,000 to attorneys of public employees unions over a law barring payroll deduction of political contributions, some $2 million to plaintiffs attorneys in a 2005 tax-refund case and, in 1997, $10,000 for an open-meetings law violation.
fahys@sltrib.com
