Why Utah Inland Port Authority creates a growth paradox | Opinion
The area at I-80 near 7200 West where the Utah inland port is planned to be built in Salt Lake City is pictured on Jan. 27, 2020.
Steve Griffin, Deseret News
In 1849, fantastical rags to riches rumors from the California gold rush swirled among Utahns, and they were tempted to join the frenzied pursuit of instant wealth. Leaders in the area were alarmed, and appropriately warned Utahns against the lure of stories that were simply too good to be true, and against the temptation of allowing one’s life to be driven by material pursuits. Utah’s political leaders today are promoting a new kind of gold rush, and we should be just as resistant to their sales pitch.
Perpetual growth, infinite real estate development and seas of mega-warehouses are the gold of 2023. The Utah Inland Port Authority is bestowing its gold in the form of subsidies for our biggest construction companies and real estate developers so it is easier and cheaper for them to build more online distribution centers with massive warehouse farms, most of them near or right on top of Great Salt Lake wetlands. Every Utah cul-de-sac may be blessed with a port; nine are already in the works.
While the Utah Inland Port Authority extends taxpayer-funded “gold” to developers, it tells the public, “It will “empower” your community, increase your tax base. Your children will be offered great jobs right in your neighborhood. It will “fast track growth,” while improving air quality. For good measure, the Utah Inland Port Authority will “protect Great Salt Lake wetlands.” A 2023 gold rush indeed.
Peeling back the hype, the Utah Inland Port Authority’s story is short on common sense, logic and facts, long on corporate coddling, and is the opposite of what every other inland port in the country has experienced. There’s nothing “smart” about the Utah Inland Port Authority’s growth.
Utah’s unemployment rate is 2.7%, essentially full employment. More jobs alone will add little economic stimulus, especially if those jobs are low paying warehouse jobs. The overall economic impact can even be a net negative. In 2020, Amazon warehouse employees were on food stamps in nine states, and opportunities for advancement are rare.
The Utah Inland Port Authority boasts its plans will decrease air pollution by shifting product movement from trucks to trains. In fact, that will backfire. In California, per ton of goods shipped, trucks are cleaner than trains, and by 2030, will be about four times cleaner. But the Utah Inland Port Authority’s entire premise is its ports will attract a massive increase in product shipment through Utah — imports and exports — and that means more emissions from trucks, trains and airplanes (an overlooked, major pollution source). Mega-warehouse farms in other states are not nicknamed ”diesel death zones” because they cleaned up community air pollution.
Rail yards are hardly cleaner than truck depots. Trains obviously cannot go all the places trucks do, and diesel trucks are needed to bring goods to and from trains. Increasing the total amount of goods shipped will inevitably increase, not decrease truck traffic. Moreover, every transfer of a shipping container to and from a train in a rail yard requires a diesel “switcher” engine, usually the most polluting engines in operation, spewing diesel exhaust 24/7. A loophole in the Clean Air Act allows locomotives to remain in operation indefinitely, and many are 60-70 years old. Bringing more rail yards and ports to Utah’s communities will hardly improve anyone’s quality of life. As one resident living near a rail yard said, “Nobody wants to live next to a railroad track. You move next to a railroad track because you don’t have other options.”
The Utah Inland Port Authority plans to smother more than 50,000 acres of critical wetlands with seas of asphalt, concrete and warehouses that will also increase air pollution even without vehicles, because intact wetlands reduce local air pollution, and asphalt emits a stunning amount of VOCs (precursors of ozone and PM2.5) for years after paving. Amputating its wetlands will hasten the demise of Great Salt Lake and its degradation into a gigantic dust bowl. The Utah Inland Port Authority’s narrative that it can somehow build on top of wetlands and yet not destroy them is nonsensical. Without its subsidies, those areas would be otherwise unsuitable for warehouse construction. If it is thinking it can create new wetlands to compensate, it does not understand the importance of natural wetlands and their function.
Like the California gold rush, the Utah Inland Port Authority’s 21st century gold rush will create a few fortunes, but everyone else will pay for it with a diminished quality of life, and holding nothing but fool’s gold.
Dr. Brian Moench is the president of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment.
