It’s been four long years but the proverbial cat is out of the bag concerning the Inland Port, the little scheme orchestrated by Utah House Speaker Greg Hughes to move the square-mile Utah prison out of Draper for his dreams of real estate development (The Point) and place it on the shores of the Great Salt Lake in tandem with another proposed and gigantic real estate joyride that was then given an impressive name to fool people.
Recent events have included an Inland Port Authority audit that revealed upwards of $40 million has been spent with very little to show for it. Nobody knows where some of that money went. Then the executive director, whose salary and benefits were more than $300,000 per year, was fired as various shenanigans were discovered. And recently we learned from a respected California transportation economist, who has studied the matter carefully, that the basic business model of the port is a laughing stock; that it has no chance of success. In fact, the private sector is handling logistics quite adequately, which means, obviously, that the Legislature’s experiment in “socialism for friends” is an utter and complete failure.
The time has come to return the 16,000 acres (one-fourth of the land area of Salt Lake City) — that the overreaching Legislature seized in 2018 — to the city for further development — if any — and to protect the Great Salt Lake and its birds, and to let the city collect the tax revenues that rightly belong to it instead of sending those revenues to the state. The lunacy inherent in creating an Inland Port has now been fully exposed and it should be abolished forever.
James King, Salt Lake City
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