By Aidan Mortensen | KOAL News
The Carbon County Board of Commissioners convened on Wednesday, Oct. 1, as the body began its month with a biweekly meeting. On the agenda for the commissioners were presentations from Huntsman at Home, an update on the Kinney No. 2 Mine and a discussion on ongoing construction projects throughout the county.
Kicking off the affair was Huntsman at Home, represented by Angie Fausett and Chris Waite. “What we do is we take care of Huntsman cancer patients in Carbon, Emery, and Grand counties,” explained Fausett. ” We recently were the recipients of the ARPA-H grant through the Department of Health and Human Services. It’s called the Paradigm Grant. So what that will do is bring a mobile clinic to Carbon, Emery, and Grand starting November 2026. What we’ll be able to do there is start to administer chemotherapy, immunotherapy, and some clinical trials, as well as doing imaging and hospital-level labs. So we will truly be bringing cancer care to the community at that point.”
Partnering with organizations, such as Castleview Hospital, the group aims to make treatment easily accessible to everyone battling cancer.
“There’s a lot of patients that skip their treatments during the winter time because they don’t want to travel the canyon in the icy conditions, and it’s also just very expensive to be traveling so far so often for treatment, and so when this program’s up and running to its fullest capacity, it’s going to be really incredible to bring that directly to the patients, to their homes, to their communities, to try to avoid skipping treatments, avoid that cancer progression that happens when they skip their treatments, and just fill a really needed gap in our communities,” added Waite.
Moving forward, the commissioners tackled an amendment to a real estate purchase agreement between the county and the Division of Wildlife Resources. “The Division of Wildlife Resources has a large parcel of property west of the, in the consumers area west of town here that they purchased quite a few years ago, and they’ve got some small parcels in the middle of that. It’s the old town site of consumers, and Carbon County has three parcels that somehow ended up getting turned over to us,” explained Commissioner Larry Jensen.
“The original stuff that came to us some time ago was just for the one small parcel, so they’ve added the other two to this agreement. The original agreement was for a purchase price of $3,000 for that one parcel, and with these additional parcels, their offer is $77,400. So they’re useless to us. They’re right in the middle of their wildlife management area, and access for anybody is very limited.”
Hearing this, the commission unanimously approved the amendment.
Next up for the body was the ratification of a memorandum of understanding with the Family Support Centers of Utah and Carbon County. Presenting on the matter was Shelley Wright, director of the Children’s Justice Center and Family Support Center.
“This is just to continue operating with the Family Support Centers of Utah. We received additional funding this fiscal year, so we’re excited about that to be able to continue operating our Family Support Center,” said the director. Again, with no controversy, the MOU was ratified.
Following this, another ratification took center stage, this time between the county and Jones & DeMille engineering for work on Fairgrounds Road. “A little over two years ago we applied for some help to rebuild the road between the fairgrounds road on between Westwood Boulevard and the fairgrounds and in that process we’ve hired Jones & DeMille to do the engineering on that project in conjunction with the Utah Department of Transportation, who was involved in this because of the federal money that we’re getting,” shared Jensen. “And so this is just an agreement to ratification of the agreement that we were already in the middle of with Jones & DeMille.”
Commissioner Tony Martines added,” This process was started before any announcements were made in this community about potential growth around the fairgrounds road. So this is not in correlation in any way or manner.”
Moving ahead on the agenda, the commission addressed a sublease agreement between Carbon County, Carbon Resources LLC, and Coal Energy Group 3, LLC.
“In 2017, Carbon County entered into an agreement with Carbon Resources LLC, which is a company out of Pueblo, Colorado, that leased the coal resource owned by Carbon County in the previous Columbine and Kinney mines,” explained Jensen. “This mine is the one that’s been talked about recently that would be right just north of the town of Scofield, and Carbon Resources, who has the lease with Carbon County, for a 10-year period, which ends in March of 2027. So they are under an agreed-on lease currently, and they want to sublease to Coal Energy Group 3 LLC, the folks who would actually do the mining.”
Last discussed by the commission in March, Jensen spoke to the public backlash of the current plan: “I know there’s controversy, a lot of folks up there are not in favor of the mine being there. This group has received twice in previous years mine permits for that mine and both of those times there was no objection to the mine being put there. And now, as they’ve gone in a third time to renew the mine permit, which still is going to require a lot of things moving forward if they even do it.”
However, Jensen also shared that due to the nature of the lease agreement, the county was under an obligation to allow the mining of coal at the proposed site.
The penultimate topic of discussion for the commissioners was an update from Deputy Assessor Kevin Ewell on Assessor-initiated adjustments. “We have just over 300 left to work through so we keep getting phone calls where am I at where am I at you’re on the list so we’re getting there just doing what we can to make through that hoping to get through the list in the next two to three weeks so that everybody is either their appeals resolved or it’s in a hearing so that we can move forward,” said Ewell.
Closing out the public portion of the meeting, the commissioners visited a potential resolution encouraging the expansion of Intermountain Electronics to the Loudermilk property with tax incentives.
“They’re seeking additional tax incentives like they were given in their original expansion on Highway 6 just east of Price. And so this is a nod from us that we’re in approval of moving forward with the several steps that have to occur along the way to get this thing to the finish line,” explained Jensen.
Part of these benefits would be a partial reimbursement of taxes to IE from the various racing entities around Carbon County for a set amount of time. However, Commissioner Martines noted that these incentives would be performance and landmark-based. “There are benchmarks that have to be obtained, certain limits that have to be hit, employment numbers, all sorts of things like that and if they’re not achieved then the incentive cannot be issued out. So it’s not just a flat ‘here you go,’ there are things that the owner has to prove in order to get these incentives.”
Commissioner Jared Haddock spoke to the perceived necessity of the expansion,” Intermountain Electronics is entering into contracts with customers that are buying their product, which has made it critical that they do this big expansion, and their estimates are that it’ll be multiple buildings and the need for an additional 600 employees over time. So this continues to be a big thing with regard to the employees they hire.”
The resolution was approved by a 3-0 decision.
The meeting was then closed to the public for discussion of impending litigation. With this being the final item on the agenda, the meeting was effectively adjourned for the public.
Watch the full meeting here: