The Book Cliffs Highway, a proposed $3 million dollar per mile of paved road connecting the P.R. Spring Tar Sands Mine to I-70, has come up again. We’ve fought it off before, once in ’92 when Grand County restructured it’s governance structure, and again last year when the Grand County Council pulled out of the Six County Infrastructure Coalition in order to avoid being outvoted over support for this project in our county. It is very important to stop this project at all costs. Industry in that area includes fracking for oil and gas, tar sands mining and oil shale mining.  For these forms of extreme energy production to continue, they need a transport connection to a refinery. Truck traffic in the Uintah Basin to the North is at it’s maximum, and their plans for a rail system or a heated pipeline to the region have been thwarted. It is our job, as folks who care about this area, to get involved to stop this Highway from ever being completed.

The feasibility study on the road can be seen here.

The Grand County Transportation Special Service District will host a presentation about this on
February 11th  at 6 p.m. at the Grand Center, 182 North 500 West.