By TANYA SMITH
The State Highway Commission took over Tooele County's main road late last week. The road leads from the Interstate to Dugway Proving Grounds, and accesses the Skull Valley Band of Goshute Reservation.
The development occurred under the influence of Governor Mike Leavitt, in an effort to make the Skull Valley Band's plans for a nuclear storage facility on their reservation more difficult.
The tribe has recently leased land to Public Fuel Storage as part of the preliminaries to building a nuclear waste facility on a parcel of their reservation.
Incensed Tooele County commissioners have compared the takeover to Clinton's covert moves in taking land away from the state to make a national monument at Escalante earlier this year.
'The Governor called me at 3 p.m. the day before to tell me that he had put the county road on the agenda of the Highway Commission,' said Gary Griffith, Tooele Commissioner. 'The amount of time that he gave us to be aware of the takeover was the same amount of time that Clinton gave him notice on the Escalante National monument.'
Griffith considered the move a 'slap in the face' to residents in Tooele, but said that if the state wanted to maintain the road, that the county would be happy hand over maintenance responsibility.
'It was no different for the Governor in Salt Lake City to take the road from the County than it was for the president in Washington, D.C. to take land away for the national government from the governor,' Griffith said.
Leon Bear, Skull Valley Band Chairman, is not worried about the recent road takeover by the state. 'We have until 2002 to fight this out,' Bear said. 'Hopefully we will come to some terms before then.'
Bear does not think that the state can effectively put restrictions on their newly-owned road because they would violate the Interstate Commerce Act, not to mention other laws that require the state to notify holders of Indian lands of changes in right-of-ways.
'Under the Interstate Commerce Act, the state can't restrict commerce (between states),' said Bear. 'The state is not restricting spend fuel traveling through the state,' continued Bear. '(If the state changes their policy for us) they would have to question the whole transportation of spent fuel, of any radioactive waste, low or high.'
'The right-of-way of Indian lands is protected under CFR 25 part 69,' Bear added. 'They are supposed to give us notification if they change any part of the agreement in our right-of-ways.'
The nuclear waste facility would include 120 acres of cement pads on which a total of 2,000 casks weighing over 40 tons each would sit. A brochure written by the Nuclear Energy Institute states that the used uranium rod pellets would be sealed in a stainless steel cylinder, encased in a heavy-metal shielding, and have an additional two layers of steel put over the top.
Rex Allen, tribe secretary, pointed out that there are seven other military and hazardous waste sites in the vicinity of the reservation.
'It looks like we're being singled out,' Allen said. 'If you were a business property in the middle of a business zone, and you decided to open up a business, and were denied to have a license, or transportation of your products, how would it make you feel, as a minority?'
In an interview with KBYU last Friday, Congressman Merrill Cook said he opposed the Skull Valley Tribe's proposal for various reasons.
'I don't think Utah should become the nuclear dumping ground for the nation,' Cook said. 'I don't think they've worked out the technology and science related to this storage.'
Cook said he thought that an alternate site in Yucca Mountain, NV, seemed safer to him than the Goshute's site.