This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2011, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
The point of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act — known to its friends as The Stimulus — was not just to chuck large piles of cash into circulation. (Not that there is necessarily anything wrong with that, when the nation is dipping into the most serious depression since the great one.)
The point was to get done a lot of things that needed doing anyway. No serious person argues that the United States did not have a very long list of items in the category of what the real estate agents like to call "deferred maintenance." Among those were highways, bridges, schools, runways, parking lots, parks, IT upgrades, fuel-efficient buses and environmental cleanups.
And high on that list was the long-delayed removal of the 16 million-ton pile of toxic radioactive waste from the Atlas uranium mill stacked alongside the Colorado River at Moab. The question was never whether that mess needed to be cleaned up, or whether it was a federal responsibility to do so, but whether we could find the money.
The question changed with the arrival of the Bush recession, brought on by an unprecedented convergence of Wall Street skullduggery and government negligence. It inspired a similarly unprecedented effort by the federal government to get a lot of money out into the starving economy, create jobs, restart the flow of credit and generally fill in where the private markets had utterly failed to keep the engine of the American economy humming. Or even sputtering.
Now, it is the stimulus that is sputtering. And its work is far from done.
Unemployment remains high and, for many, seemingly permanent. A jobless recovery cannot be a recovery for very long.
And the money directed to the Atlas cleanup is being choked off. An effort that had hauled away some 4 million tons of waste over the past two years will have to slow down due to the fact that the Department of Energy is running out of money for such things. That will not only slow down a project that had already been left undone for far too long, it will eliminate some 220 jobs in an economy that is unlikely to be able to absorb that many idle workers. If anything, such layoffs only depress the economy further.
The Atlas cleanup, like the rest of the stimulus package, was intended to do two things that needed doing: Remove a toxic mess and create much-needed jobs. That work has proceeded apace, but it is not done.
U.S. Rep. Jim Matheson is trying to convince the DOE to keep the project going. He deserves to succeed.