Park City has just awarded a $2.1 million contract for environmental and preliminary design services for a project they call Re-Create 248. 

The contract is for a 36-month project that includes the federal environmental review process required to use federal money. It will take about that much time, but just in case, there are a couple of one-year extensions built into it. What’s five years when we’re studying an existing road with few options for expansion. 

Between existing buildings and mountains that don’t move easily, there are not a lot of design options. So spending three to five years studying it seems, well, pretty typical of things around here.

There is a growing school of thought that one of the United States’ biggest problems is that we simply can’t get things done. Widening 248 requires taking into consideration the opinions of every potgut that might be displaced. Since the 1970s, when the National Environmental Policy Act was adopted, we have been studying the impacts of highways. 

We should understand them now. Highways are bad from an environmental standpoint. They produce dirty runoff in the form of dripped motor oil and other fluids, tire rubber and in this climate, a whole lot of road salt. All of that ends up in the watershed — which locally mixes with lead, arsenic and other unpleasantness left over from the mining days. All those cars produce air pollution. 

If you trace it all the way back through the oil refinery to the wellhead, there’s nothing good about it.

Except that people exist, and go to work, and don’t commute by horseback from Heber to Park City on a regular basis. So it is all a system of compromises, which should be well known and understood by now. I’m hard pressed to see how it can require three years and $2.1 million to predict the impacts of making changes to the road profile. But there we are. 

The existing traffic mess will remain in place for the duration, which has environmental impacts of its own, like a whole lot more air pollution from all those cars stuck in traffic.

If I had back all of the time I have spent in traffic on 248, I would be 40 years old again.  Based on that accumulated experience, which is available for a lot less than $2.1 million, I think they could create the desired bus lanes for about $2,000 in paint and a night with the paint sprayer truck, restriping the existing pavement to make four lanes. 

There wouldn’t be a break-down lane. The highway engineers say, “What if there is a breakdown? Without a breakdown lane, a stalled car might create a traffic jam.” 

To which the answer is, “Have you driven 248?” I’ll take the odds of a random flat tire that forces the bus back into the normal back up every couple of months. It can’t be that difficult.

The other extreme in the getting things done department is MIDA. MIDA is a well-intended state agency gone rogue. It facilitated construction of a bunch of warehouses and machine shops around Hill Air Force Base that were necessary to adapt to its shifting purpose in the military.   

Then it miraculously replaced about 20 beds near Snowbasin with East Village with no local involvement. Then a hotel in Sundance. And now is looking at mini-nuclear reactors all across the state at former National Guard sites. Warehouses, hotels, ski resort and nuclear power — it all fits together. Sure. 

MIDA is the promoter of the data center in Box Elder County. It appears to have been sprung on the public with no advance discussion. I don’t know if the proposal is good, bad or indifferent. The AI that it will help power might cure cancer or wipe out humanity, in which case widening 248 is the least of our worries. Nobody knows. 

So that one seems like a decision that shouldn’t be rushed. We don’t know the environmental impacts of 60-square-mile data centers because unlike highways, we haven’t been building them for a hundred years.

A project of that scale didn’t erupt overnight. It had to have been under discussion and review for months, if not longer. The governor’s office was clearly involved. The Legislature changed law governing water rights approvals in anticipation of it, in a way that eliminates public benefit as a consideration in making a decision. 

MIDA may have had it on their agenda, and even published notice of the meetings. But MIDA’s office is in Kaysville, so posting the agenda on the door of their office doesn’t impart any notice at all to people in Box Elder County. Or maybe it never got on an agenda, and kept the discussions secret, at a staff level. 

The first public notice of it came through the Division of Water Rights, when a change application was filed to move irrigation water into industrial use. That happens deep in the planning process.

I can’t tell if MIDA just sprung the thing on Box Elder County or if there had been on-going, secret discussions that didn’t formally reach the County Commission level. But it all feels like MIDA has greased the skids to expedite the project and avoid public involvement. 

There’s a pretty significant difference between getting things done and bad government. 

Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986.