| Updated: Feb. 5, 2021, 12:52 a.m.
Opponents of the inland port project planned for Salt Lake City’s northwest side have long worried that leaders behind the massive distribution hub would pursue the creation of a second rail line something they say would “supersize” the already controversial project and lead to increased emissions.
So alarm bells went off
when the director of the Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration (SITLA), which owns property in the inland port area, seemed to confirm those plans in his comments to a state budget committee last week.
SITLA leader David Ure told the Natural Resources, Agriculture, and Environmental Quality Appropriations Subcommittee that he anticipated legislation was coming this session that would help the organization clean up the 770-acre North Temple Landfill it owns within the inland port boundaries “so that the inland port can take place.”
| Updated: 2:13 p.m.
It seems like ages ago now that Utah officials were making plans for a massive data-guzzling surveillance program from a company called Banjo, designed to help alert law enforcement to potential crimes as they happen.
The program, promoted aggressively by Attorney General Sean Reyes, fell apart not because of privacy concerns, but because of revelations that the company’s founder was involved in a white supremacist attack on a Jewish synagogue in his youth. Really.
Now he’s poised to do something about it.
Gibson has introduced HB243, which would create a chief privacy officer for the state and a 12-member Personal Privacy Oversight Committee the first of its kind in the United States, according to supporters made up of experts in the field and housed in the Utah State Auditor’s Office.