Thank you for helping us make 2014 a productive year for our efforts to protect Utah’s public health and environment. Below is a list of what we — and you — accomplished!
Before we get to that, we wanted to thank our donors, volunteers, citizen activists, fellow non-profit partners, and supporters!
With your help over the past year, we:
- Made the 2014 legislative session the most successful yet in terms of clean air legislation. While there’s still much more to do, HEAL and our allies in and out of the legislature helped introduce a record 22 clean air bills, of which 9 passed. This meant $4.6 million in new funding for clean air!
- Urged state air quality regulators to close certain loopholes on pollution from big industry (such as requiring new controls in 2015 — rather than 2019 ) and they did!
- Stopped Rocky Mountain Power from levying a “tax on the sun” for rooftop solar owners. In conjunction with Utah Clean Energy, the Sierra Club, UCARE, and others, we helped turn back our utility’s attack on renewable energy owners who are doing their part to invest in clean energy.
- Worked with our partners in Summit County to move forward on innovative policies that would allow residents to have a say in how much renewable energy they can purchase from Rocky Mountain Power. This effort is ongoing!
- Organized and hosted the visit of Under Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller to Utah to organize support for a ban on nuclear weapons testing.
- Continued our legal challenge of the water rights awarded to the proposed Green River nuclear reactors.
- Kept up the pressure to keep long-lived depleted uranium waste from being disposed of at EnergySolutions dump site in the West Desert.
- Investigated coal ash contamination at the Sunnyside coal plant in Central Utah and began working with local residents and legal experts to determine how best to protect the health and environment of those who live nearby.
- Supported new federal regulations to protect the public from coal ash waste.
- Worked with the Sierra Club to gather over 4,400 comments calling for greater pollution controls on emissions from Utah’s Hunter and Huntington coal plants.
- And of course: We said goodbye to our Executive Director Christopher Thomas. We wish him all the best in grad school!
We’re confident 2015 will be great too.
If you’d like to make a donation in support of HEAL’s 2015 work, you can do so here. Thank you!