Latest Skull Valley venture: trash dump

The latest venture would come in the form of bales of garbage — household trash from the Wasatch Front with all the cardboard, newspaper, glass, plastics and other recyclables removed and tightly compressed together in bundles — to be buried on 500 acres of the reservation, 75 miles southwest of Salt Lake City.

"This is a neat deal for the Goshutes," said Steve Handy, spokesman for the CR Group, a consortium of garbage operators that entered into the deal with the tribe last September.

Goshute Indians stand to earn a minimum of $15,000 a month in rent and royalties from the landfill operation, called "Tekoi Balefill," and provide 20 tribal members jobs to operate it, Handy said.

"This is a tremendous and necessary benefit to our people," Leon Bear, the tribal chairman, said in a prepared statement.

But a garbage dump is not most people's idea of desirable development.

"The reservation is not a wasteland," said Margene Bullcreek, one of the few Goshutes who lives on the reservation. "It's not a very positive economic development for our children."

In fact, Bullcreek recalls that the Goshutes lost millions of dollars in a similar deal made with LE&B, a limited liability company based in Kentucky, back in the mid-1990s when the recycling plant went belly up. "We lost a lot of money on that when it went bankrupt," she added.

Tooele County bought the property in bankruptcy court, and it is now the county's recycling and landfill facility.

County commissioners say the greatest impact of the landfill will be felt on the reservation, where waste is nearly the only economic development the impoverished tribe has been able to attract.

"There's no real advantage to us other than the Goshutes hurting for businesses and money," said Commissioner Dennis Rockwell. "If it's going to benefit them, then it's great."

The economic benefits of a separate proposal by a consortium of nuclear power utilities to store highly radioactive spent fuel rods on the reservation prompted the Tooele County Commission to support it. That proposal by Private Fuel Storage is still pending before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The Tekoi Balefill, so-called because its location is near Tekoi Knolls, 10 miles north of the Dugway Proving Grounds, is undergoing environmental review by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which is taking public comments through the end of March.

Although the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has little oversight because the proposal is on sovereign land, backers of the project say it's a very laborious regulatory process.

Comments

Add your comment