By Aidan Mortensen | KOAL News

Following a lengthy meeting of the Emery County Board of Commissioners, Commissioner Jordan Leonard sat down with the KOAL newsroom to discuss land use, industry and energy within the county.

Opening our discussion, Leonard spoke regarding a grant application put in by the county for its business incubator project. “We have a weed and mosquito shop that we’ve kind of abandoned because we built a new facility for the weed and mosquito a few years back, but we had some empty buildings that we were looking to put businesses in as an incubator.”

He continued,” We have some startup businesses and we’re looking to help them grow. One of the projects we’re looking at doing is improving those buildings to make sure that they’re available for businesses to make sure they have bathrooms and running water and a good place to be.”

In total, the county applied for approximately $150,000 in funding.

Moving forward, Leonard discussed the balance the Commission is seeking to find with land access and the solar industry within Emery. “As a commission, we’ve discussed this before, and we want to protect access to those public lands. And you know, sometimes solar farms can impede that. We had a couple of presentations yesterday. One of them is a current solar project that’s already functioning. They’re looking to do battery storage to harness some of that energy and so they’re looking to have containers that you know can do that. So we had that presentation and then there was another solar project proposed and so there’s a lot of interest because we need energy.”

The Commissioner added,” We want to create energy and be an energy producer in Emery County, but how much solar is too much? And so we’re trying to balance revenues with land use and making sure that our community’s happy.”

Switching from solar to nuclear, Leonard spoke on recent developments for the atomic industry coming to the county. “We have our two coal power plants here in Emery County, and hopefully they’re here for a long time to come. But there are proposed sites for nuclear and Green River … They’ve done a lot of land surveys and seismic testing and a lot of things that could potentially make it possible for a nuclear plant in green river. So Green River City and the city council are in support of potentially going after a nuclear power plant in Green River.”

Also in the nuclear world, the Commission approved the construction of a building at the San Rafael Energy Research Center for Valar Atomics. “Public safety is the biggest concern. Also, job opportunities for our citizens as well as property taxes going down. So there’s a lot of win-win situations, but the biggest would be safety for our community. Making sure that it’s done the right way and that our community is protected.”

Bringing our conversation full circle, Leonard discussed community development – especially civic engagement in government processes: “It’s really good to have the people that want to serve our community, and it’s great. We just always need new voices to come out and be involved. I know it’s tough, life’s challenging and we have a lot going on, but we’d love to have people on boards and committees.”

He added,” We’re always looking for people who have good ideas. Sometimes you get stagnant as a community, but you definitely always want new ideas so that you can always improve and do better.

Closing our conversation, Leonard shared,” Do what you can to be involved. We appreciate anybody willing to serve the community and go the extra mile, but finding opportunities to get on committees and boards to serve the community, and we do have a lot of people who come out and do good for the community.”