June 7, 2021: “A proposed highway through the Book Cliffs in eastern Utah is back on the table, after it was suspended last year due to pushback from Grand County and other complications — like a lack of funding. But talk of a federal infrastructure package helped revive the project last month.”

February 3, 2022: “Pursued by the SCIC for decades, the project had been unanimously suspended by the coalition late in 2020 before returning to the table last year. Grand County has long fought the highway, which it argues is unnecessary, costly and outweighed by more pressing infrastructure needs.”

September 21, 2021: “Grand County, where most of the construction would take place, is not part of the seven-county coalition, and its county commissioners oppose the project, which they say is costly, unnecessary and raises environmental concerns.”

July 22, 2021: “Do Utahns want to spend taxpayer money to the tune of $150 million to construct a new highway whose only purpose is to save tourists a few minutes of driving time?”

February 8, 2022: “The death of the Oakland project now raises other questions, namely, what to do with the $53 million in federal mineral royalties the Legislature parked in the so-called Infrastructure Throughput Fund. Established in 2016, this fund is to support the construction of big projects aimed at moving Utah-extracted minerals to market.”

February 10, 2020: “Last week, without much explanation, Harper, a Taylorsville Republican, replaced the bill with a substitute that does something else entirely: amend the state’s so-called Throughput Infrastructure Fund so it can be used toward ‘a highway used primarily for the transportation of hydrocarbons.’”

December 5, 2021: “This is a project that was ill-conceived from its inception, has misused CIB funding, threatens wildlife and ecosystems in their entirety, seeks to destroy a retired couple’s ranch, and attempts to place the financial burden of the highway and its maintenance on not only the tax payers of Grand County, but the entire state.”