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SALT LAKE CITY — Two environmental groups have joined in a lawsuit that was filed Thursday calling for all Utah Inland Port Authority decisions since 2022 to be reversed.
The Center for Biological Diversity and Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment named the Utah Inland Port Authority, Gov. Spencer Cox, Utah Senate President Stuart Adams, and Utah House Majority Leader Mike Schultz in the suit, filed in 3rd District Court.
The complaint alleges that the five-member port authority board violates the separation of powers between the Utah Legislature and executive branches of government.
The current board structure was formed through an amendment signed in March 2022 by Cox during a year of big changes at the port. The bill cut an 11-member board down to five voting and three nonvoting members.
The governor appoints two voting members, while the speaker of the House and the Senate president appoint three between the two positions. The change removed board members representing the Salt Lake City and Salt Lake County mayors, the Salt Lake City Council, and representatives from West Valley City and Magna.
Ben Hart, Utah Inland Port Authority's director, inherited the organization in September 2022.
"We needed a significant change at the port," Hart said at a January 2023 Business, Economic Development and Labor Appropriations Subcommittee meeting at the Utah Legislature. "I feel like we've made a really significant pivot and we're trying to get it right."
The lawsuit claims that change in 2022 "gave members of the state Legislature authority to both appoint and remove a majority of voting board members," but argues that the port authority "exercises essential, core, and inherent executive functions."
Utah Inland Port Authority creates project areas, "can buy, sell or lease real property, enter into contracts, receive and spend taxes, hire employees, control public infrastructure development, and sue and be sued," and for this reason, grants "legislative control over an entity that exercises traditional executive functions, in violation of the Utah Constitution's separation of powers."
"This is not just a technicality," said Brian Moench, president of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment, in a statement. "The end result of this unconstitutional law has been the Utah Inland Port Authority flouting their statutory obligations to prioritize environmental and public health protection.
Cox, at a monthly press conference Thursday, said he hadn't read the lawsuit yet, so he couldn't comment.
Hart told KSL.com, "We're not the only organization that has a makeup of appointees from both the governor and the speaker and the president."
The lawsuit said members of the environmental groups "have grown increasingly concerned" about "the board's utter failure to consider, respond to, and incorporate into its decisions the public's input and comments requesting mitigation measures that would reduce the significant environmental impacts of its decisions."
But Hart said these claims are "not accurate at all."
"I met with members of this group just a week and a half ago on the statewide logistics plan," Hart said. "There's a list of probably 20 to 30 things that we've done that better incorporate what they've asked us to do."
"We are not participating or harming wetlands in any way, shape or form," Hart said, and any claims that Utah Inland Port Authority was harming the wetlands "could not be farther from the truth."
"We are getting ready to make a $2.5 million contribution to help protect the wetlands in the northwest quadrant of Salt Lake City," Hart said. "Up in West Weber, we did something really unique. We said you cannot benefit from the port authority activities until you agree that you will not destroy any wetlands on your property."
He said 1% of tax differential revenue in Tooele County will go back to the protection of the wetlands as well.
The lawsuit requests that the Utah Inland Port Authority reverse all decisions made by the board since the structure changed in 2022, and that the current board is permanently prohibited from "taking any action in furtherance of past, void actions."
Hart said the current operation of the port is not affected by the lawsuit.
