TOOELE — The swath of land in Tooele County designated as potential storage ground for hazardous waste just got a lot smaller.
The County Commission on Tuesday voted unanimously to reduce the so-called Hazardous Waste Corridor by 88 percent. The 78,720-acre L-shaped parcel along I-80 had been specifically zoned to welcome companies like Envirocare and other waste-storage facilities since 1988.
But now, the corridor has been broken into three separate regions, totaling only 9,440 acres. I-80 used to run right through the corridor; now the three regions each surround an already existing facility, and the nearest zone will be about 1.25 miles from the freeway.
The change came because the huge chunk of land set aside for waste-storage companies had proved to be much bigger than needed, Commissioner Matt Lawrence said.
County planners saw how much of the zone was going unused "and said, 'We might as well just look at adjusting the size of the hazardous-waste zone. It's just too big,' " Lawrence said. "This to me was a pretty clear-cut thing. Nothing's going on (in the zone outside the existing facilities). Let's shrink it down."
Lawrence's comments were in response to complaints by attorneys for Cedar Mountain Environmental, a waste-storage company owned by former Envirocare president Charles Judd. Attorney Lucy Jenkins said Judd and his company should have been notified of last week's public hearing on the issue because Judd owns property in the zone.
Jenkins had asked the commission to postpone making a decision to look into Judd's land ownership.
But the problem is the county has no record of Judd or Cedar Mountain owning any land in the area, county planning director Nicole Cline said.
The 80 acres Jenkins said Judd owns are also claimed by Envirocare, which bought 315 acres of land from Judd in February. Judd had once indicated he wanted to use the land, adjacent to Envirocare's property, to store class B and C "hot" nuclear waste.
Envirocare, which once wanted to use its land to store similar kinds of waste, announced earlier this year that it has backed off those plans.
At any rate, Lawrence said, the ownership of the land and what Judd had planned to do with it did not matter in the commission's vote. The changes in the waste corridor were tailored to shrink the area permitting waste storage without stepping on the toes of companies already operating in the area.
Because Cedar Mountain does not have an existing facility in the area, it is in a different situation from Envirocare and the other two companies with facilities in the zone, the Clean Harbors Environmental Services incinerator at Aragonite and the Grassy Mountain landfill, also operated by Clean Harbors.
Neither Envirocare nor Clean Harbors challenged the zoning change. Jason Groenewold, director of the Healthy Environmental Alliance of Utah, has called the change "a step in the right direction."
E-mail: dsmeath@desnews.com