At the least, the county attorney and County Commission are engaged in a campaign of aggressive obfuscation apparently aimed at frustrating the democratic right of their constituents to have a voice in determining the county's future health and welfare.

The complicated conflict began when a grass-roots group of citizens objected to construction of the Sevier Power Project near Sigurd. The $600 million plant would burn about 940,000 tons of coal per year and spew CO2 and other pollution over the region.

When the County Commission went ahead and approved the plant anyway, the Right to Vote Committee managed to gather more than enough signatures in just over a week to put the proposal on November's ballot.

Their initiative would stop the power plant by revoking the current permit and requiring that voters approve any conditional-use permit for a coal-fired power plant. The group acted quickly, before a constitutionally suspect state law that bans initiatives and referendums on land-use issues went into effect.

At that point, the County Commission members decided not to object to the voter initiative. Instead, they contrived another tack. The initiative as written amends the "conditional-use permit ordinance." So these public servants labeled the project a "planned-unit development," which requires a different kind of permit. Even if voters approve the initiative, it would not block the Sigurd plant. Cute.

The planned-unit development label is ordinarily applied to residential projects that feature clustered housing and areas of open space. A power plant is no PUD. A conditional-use permit, on the other hand, is a variance to allow a project to go forward in a zone where it would otherwise be prohibited.

Sevier County Attorney Dale Eyre contends that the Sigurd plant was always referred to as a PUD, but an attorney for the citizens group disputes that in a complaint to the Utah Attorney General's Office, and says he has documents referring to a conditional-use permit for the plant. He also says Eyre did not notify the group of the time period when it could contest wording of the initiative.

Even if the county is innocent of skulduggery in this dispute, which seems highly unlikely, it is obviously guilty of standing in the way of citizens exercising their constitutionally protected right to legislate by initiative. That alone pollutes the atmosphere of Sevier County.