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Utah coal country’s push for a West Coast deep-water port resurfaces as Senate panel advances funding plan

One way or another, $53 million of Utah taxpayers’ money soon may get sunk into a deep-water export terminal on the West Coast in an effort to shore up the state’s fading coal industry.

On Monday, a Senate panel advanced a bill that would transfer the administration of a special “throughput infrastructure” fund to the Utah Office of Energy Development, bypassing a vetting process established by another agency charged with determining how these federally sourced dollars are spent.

Introduced last week, SB248 appears to sever the Community Impact Board’s authority over the fund it set up three years ago to support loans that promote high-dollar projects for moving Utah coal, oil and natural gas to markets.