$2.4 billion in tax-exempt bonds for Uinta Basin Railway
On June 12, 2025, UPHE submitted the following comments in regards to a proposal for $2.4 billion in tax-exempt bonds from the Utah Department of Transportation for the Uinta Basin Railway. Other excellent comments were submitted as well opposing a tax payer subsidy for this massively polluting project.
In the winters of 2012 and 2013, researchers from the University of Colorado, measured VOCs (chemicals like benzene, ethyl benzene, xylene, and toluene) over the Uinta Basin and made a frightening discovery. They found concentrations 200 times background levels, as much as would be expected from the tailpipes of 100 million cars, about the same number as all the cars registered in the United States. In some areas, benzene concentrations were 10,000 times higher than is typical for a large city. Almost all of it was from the oil and gas industry. These VOCs are highly toxic in and of themselves, as carcinogens and reproductive and developmental toxins, but they are also precursors of ozone, another, proven pollution problem in the basin.
Our physicians group took national reporters on a tour of the basin in 2015 while we did our own VOC measurements. When we got within a few hundred yards of a fracking pond, the fumes were physically overpowering, forcing us to literally run backwards away from the pond. One reporter lost his sense of smell for over a month afterwards. At other sights we saw toxic fracking waste water being sprayed through sprinklers into the atmosphere as if it was just watering a golf course. The shocking conclusions of other researchers were no surprise to us. This is a pollution nightmare.
Whenever you have a pollution nightmare you will have a public health nightmare if you look hard enough or wait long enough. We calculated the spike in neonatal deaths in the Vernal area in 2015, covered by national media, was six times the national average.
Oil production has nearly doubled since those measurements were taken and the very purpose of this railway is to increase production another 400%. Without game changing pollution controls applied throughout the industry there is no rational reason to think this railway will not directly cause a public health catastrophe for communities throughout the basin. The easily anticipated consequences would include still births, new born deaths, birth defects, leukemia and other blood disorders, all types of cancer, neurologic and respiratory and immunologic diseases. Yet I have not heard a single word from any of proponents of this railway acknowledging any of this. Meanwhile, the economic benefit would be heavily concentrated among top officials of a handful of oil companies. It is not mere speculation or hyperbole, but a scientifically based conclusion; you are sacrificing the very community you profess to be saving.
