Utah Gov. Signs Bill to Fund Oakland Coal Terminal
Utah Gov. Gary Herbert this week signed a bill appropriating $53 million in state money to fund construction of a coal export facility in Oakland.
For over a year, Bowie Resource Partners, a Kentucky-based coal company with mines in central Utah, had been attempting to line up $53 million in the form of a loan to four counties from the Community Impact Board (CIB), an agency that disburses grants and loans to mitigate the impacts of extractive industries on federal land within their boundaries. Such localities receive no tax revenues from federal land so the federal ...
Coal’s Frontmen in Oakland: Who owns TLS?
Terminal Logistics Solutions (TLS), the newly created terminal operator hoping to ship millions of tons of coal annually through a new export facility in Oakland, may, in fact, be a subsidiary of Bowie Resource Partners LLC, the coal company whose Utah mines the terminal would serve, according to documents provided by Emery County, Utah, in response to a Sierra Club public records act request.
An email from investment banker Jeffrey Holt to public officials in Utah in March 2015 reveals a bold plan to create TLS as part of "the business arrangement" between Bowie, four ...
Utah Passes Bill to Invest $53 Million in Oakland Coal Terminal
Despite widespread opposition in Utah and Oakland, the Utah state legislature has approved a bill to invest $53 million of public funds in a high-risk scheme to ship millions of tons of Utah coal through the proposed Oakland Bulk and Oversized Terminal (OBOT).
The Utah Community Impact Board (CIB) originally proposed to subsidize the Oakland export plan using protected funds that are derived from royalties on fossil fuel extraction and dedicated to community investments in Utah. When legal challenges to that plan arose, Utah State Senator Stuart Adams introduced a bill ...