Attorney General Jeff Sessions is making the formal announcement Wednesday during remarks at the Annual Law Enforcement Legislative Day hosted by the California Peace Officers’ Association in Sacramento.

“The Department of Justice and the Trump administration are going to fight these unjust, unfair, and unconstitutional policies that have been imposed on you,” Sessions said in released excerpts ahead of the address. “We are fighting to make your jobs safer and to help you reduce crime in America. And I believe we are going to win.”

The lawsuit focuses on three separate California laws: Senate Bill 54, Assembly Bill 450 and AB103 – a trio of legislation making up the state’s “sanctuary” policy.

The suit asks the federal court to block the enforcement of these laws statewide.

“Sanctuary jurisdictions” have dominated the national dialogue on immigration in recent years, with critics saying it creates a safe haven for criminal aliens, while proponents arguing it provides a safer environment for the undocumented to come forward and report crimes without fear of deportation.

In response to Sessions’ actions, California Democratic leaders swiftly responded, condemning the lawsuit as a political stunt.

“At a time of unprecedented political turmoil, Jeff Sessions has come to California to further divide and polarize America,” Gov. Jerry Brown tweeted.

“Trump and Sessions think they can bully California – but it won’t work,” U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., added.

But the Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen praised the decision.

“California has chosen to purposefully contradict the will and the responsibility of the Congress to protect our homeland,” Nielsen said in a statement. “I appreciate the efforts of Attorney General Sessions and the Department of Justice to uphold the rule of law and protect American communities.”

The decision by the Justice Department is perhaps the boldest yet in taking aim at the alleged obstruction of federal law, going on offense after a series of suits filed against the administration from California’s attorney general Xavier Becerra on issues like immigration and climate change.

“No matter what happens in Washington, #California will stay the course and enforce all our laws and protect all our people. That’s how we keep our communities safe. #Immigration,” Becerra wrote in response to the news.

More recently, Oakland mayor Libby Schaaf grabbed national headlines after she warned area residents of upcoming ICE raids, with agency officials accusing her of promoting lawless and undercutting federal authority.

A strike by nearly 3,000 Oakland city employees will continue for a seventh day today when a mediator agreed to over the weekend will begin meeting with civic and union officials.

Oakland city staffers depicted the decision by Mayor Libby Schaaf (pictured) to accept the mediator chosen by the Service Employers International Union Local 1021 – David Weinberg, who worked as a federal mediator for 17 years – as a sign of progress. But Schaaf was rebuffed after pleading that strikers return to work while mediation proceeds to minimize effects on elderly residents who rely on senior services and families that use Head Start.

Chief SEIU Local 1021 negotiator Rob Szykowny used a weekend interview with the San Francisco Chronicle to once again knock the Schaaf administration for “bad faith” and to question the mayor’s claim that the city’s finances are in such poor shape that it can’t be generous on raises.

On Thursday, the city gave what Schaaf described as its “last, best and final offer” – a 4 percent raise in the first year of a two-year contract, with a 1 percent raise in the second year and an additional 1 percent raise if the city reached revenue goals. The SEIU responded by proposing a 4 percent raise in the first year and a phased-in raise in the second year that would add up to 4 percent.

Pension crisis driving city bargaining position

Schaaf immediately rejected the counteroffer, citing projections that Oakland’s pension costs will soar by 49 percent over the next five years. The city has for many decades addressed the cost of retirement benefits on a pay-as-you-go basis, leaving $2.8 billion in unfunded liabilities. With an aging workforce increasingly retiring, this means the benefits will consume nearly one-quarter of Oakland’s budget by 2022, according to a five-year financial forecast issued in March. A 2015 California Policy Center report concluded that Oakland had the heaviest per-capita pension debt of any city in the state.

Nevertheless, Szykowny rejected the gloomy talk and argued that many of the city’s fiscal projections “are disingenuous at best.”

While police, fire and emergency services have not been affected, most other city services have been shut down since last Tuesday, when the strike began. Besides the SEIU local, the much-smaller International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers Local 21, which also has been unable to finalize a new contract with the city, also has been on strike. Further disrupting the city: members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 1245 and some other local unions are refusing to cross SEIU picket lines.

The pension crisis that Schaaf cited has been building for more than 60 years, with city officials consistently refusing to make annual payments that actuaries said were necessary.

In 1976, the 25-year-old Police and Fire Retirement System was so underfunded that desperate city officials shut it down and persuaded voters to issue long-term bonds to cover the system’s liabilities.

In 1988, voters approved a proposal to extend the payback deadline for the bonds from 2016 to 2026.

Despite being warned that using bonds to pay for ongoing pension costs was a dangerous strategy, Oakland leaders have repeatedly done so. In 2012, for example, then-Mayor Jean Quan persuaded the City Council to issue $210 million in pension obligation bonds. Then-Councilwoman Schaaf was the biggest critic of the idea, warning that it put the city on track to having to spend much more on pension bond and interest payments than on pensions themselves by 2024.

As expected, NFL owners meeting at a Phoenix resort have given their blessing to Raiders owner Mark Davis’ plan to move the team from Oakland to Las Vegas on a 31-1 vote.

The Monday decision came after NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell rejected Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf’s last-minute appeal to delay the relocation vote and consider a new stadium proposal unveiled last week. The plan called for building a $1.3 billion football stadium on a 55-acre parcel south of the Oakland Coliseum, where the Raiders now play – a proposal that Schaaf described as a “fully financed, shovel-ready project.” It was structured around a $600 million commitment from the Fortress Investment Group, a New York hedge fund.

But in a lengthy letter released by the NFL, Goodell made clear the league didn’t buy the idea the proposal was either fully financed or shovel-ready. It stated that none of the various proposals offered by the city and its potential development partners at any point had ever come close to meeting the league’s basic requirements to retain the Raiders.

“We have been prepared for nearly two years to work on finding a solution based on access to land at a certain cost, without constraints on the location of the stadium or timing of construction, and clarity on overall development,” Goodell wrote. “However, at this date, there remains no certainty regarding how the site will be fully developed.”

The Nevada Legislature’s October decision to commit to providing $750 million in public dollars to a new Raiders stadium proved decisive, as many NFL insiders had predicted.

Raiders will keep playing in Oakland for at least two years

The pain of losing a team with one of pro sports’ most fanatical fan bases will be particularly acute for Oakland. That’s because unlike the last two NFL team relocations – the San Diego Chargers in January to Los Angeles and the St. Louis Rams a year ago to Los Angeles – Oakland will continue to be the Raiders’ base for two or even three more seasons as a $1.9 billion, 65,000-seat stadium complex is built in Las Vegas. The 35,500-seat Sam Boyd Stadium in Las Vegas used by UNLV’s college football team is not up to NFL standards.

This extended goodbye doesn’t sit well with some in the Bay Area. “Mark Davis didn’t deserve the fans he had. Get out of here, right now,” one columnist wrote Monday afternoon.

In a Phoenix news conference, Davis acknowledged fans’ pain and said he would “use the coming days [to] try to explain to them what went into making this difficult decision.”

Now Schaaf and other Oakland leaders will need to make big decisions about whether to pursue another NFL team – similar to decisions still to be made in San Diego, where a Major League Soccer team has its eyes on the Qualcomm Stadium site.

But Goodell’s letter – while polite – offered clear hints about the chilly reception Oakland might get if it seeks another team without having fully established and vetted funding to pay for most or nearly all of a stadium project. Goodell noted Schaaf’s acknowledgment that substantial direct taxpayer funding is very unlikely.

Oakland’s hope for future NFL team: Benevolent billionaire

Unless one (or more) deep-pockets billionaires emerge who is willing to mostly or entirely fund a new stadium – like Rams owner Stan Kroenke is doing in Inglewood – this creates a bad dynamic for Oakland. The city will never be considered a serious contender to get a relocated team without a stadium in place. But building a stadium without first getting an NFL commitment is a billion-dollar-plus gamble.

The NFL owners’ decision adds to what has been a rough year for Oakland. The Raiders’ delayed exit adds to the angst stemming from the Ghost Fire blaze that killed 36 people in January and the pending departure of the Golden State Warriors from the Oracle arena in Oakland for new digs by the ocean across the bay in San Francisco.

Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf told reporters Thursday that Police Chief Sean Whent was resigning, with the chief vaguely citing “personal reasons.” But the East Bay Express on Friday broke the real reason Whent was leaving after three years on the job:

According to interviews with the victim, elected officials, and sources close to OPD, in addition to documents obtained by the Express, at least 14 Oakland police officers, three Richmond police officers, and four Alameda County sheriff’s deputies had sex with the girl who goes by the name Celeste Guap. (The Express is not publishing Guap’s real name because she was a sexually exploited minor when the abuse began.)

Three Oakland police officers [allegedly] committed statutory rape of Guap when she was under-age. She says all of the law-enforcement agents who had sex with Guap knew she worked as a sex worker.

According to text messages between police officers and the victim, at least three OPD officers leaked her confidential information about undercover prostitution stings. One Oakland cop obtained police reports and criminal histories and shared them with the victim, which is against department policy.

Guap also said she slept with cops as a form of protection.

Officer’s 2015 suicide triggered internal probe

Other news agencies scrambled to corroborate the account. The Associated Press reported that four Oakland officers are on leave because of their dealings with the sex worker.

Meanwhile, the young woman at the center of the case gave an on-camera interview to KPIX in which she repeated the allegations the Express reported. 

She only named one officer, however: Brendan O’Brien, an Oakland patrolman who committed suicide in September 2015.

O’Brien’s suicide spurred on the internal investigation of officer misconduct whose details have been emerging for the past month.

In San Francisco, Police Chief Suhr was willing to defend most of  his officers even as allegations grew. But in Oakland, officials described themselves as shocked and heartsick — and prepared to clean house.

“The Police Department is supposed to protect those young kids,” Councilman Larry Reid told The Los Angeles Times. “As a father with four daughters – that something like this could occur in our city and with some members of the Oakland police – it makes me sick to the stomach.”

“We continue to be disgusted and outraged by the idea that anyone could abuse an underage victim of sexual exploitation – particularly those who have sworn to uphold the law and protect our communities; we are sickened to think anyone could even know of such abuse and not bring that information forward,” Mayor Schaaf said in a prepared statement.

“To think that officers were engaged in the sexual exploitation of a child: It’s heartbreaking,” City Council President Lynette Gibson McElhaney told the Bay Area News Group. “And if it’s true, it’s criminal, and they should be prosecuted.”

Sex worker contacted police chief’s wife

While not offering broad corroboration of the Express scoop, the Mercury-News reported Sunday that Schaaf demanded Whent’s resignation because of her belief he had badly botched the investigation. It also reported an unusual detail: Guap had contacted the police chief’s wife, Julia Whent, via Facebook in June 2015 and that she knew Guap was dating an officer.

What makes the Oakland scandal particularly embarrassing is that the local police force is in the 13th year of having a federal monitor review its activities because of past officer misconduct. In 2012, “Oakland became the first U.S. city Wednesday to willfully surrender authority over its command staff to a court-appointed director,” the Oakland Tribune reported.

The new scandal would appear to raise basic questions about the value of this extended federal oversight.

Little was heard about president Barack Obama’s call, in his last State of the Union address, to make community college free around the country. But now, facing gnawing affordability problems and the prospect of weakened enrollment, many of California’s community colleges — and sympathetic officials — have embarked on a patchwork of programs and initiatives designed to capitalize on the prestige of the president’s vision. 

Perhaps predictably, ground zero for the new effort is the city of Oakland, where Mayor Libby Schaaf, a former aide to Gov. Jerry Brown, has pushed one of the more sweeping and aggressive moves to alter the way community colleges are paid for. Schaaf “is championing a $39 million citywide initiative called Oakland Promise that includes a free semester of community college for new graduates,” as the San Jose Mercury News reported. “While Oakland’s initiative is far more ambitious and costly than most of the other new programs inspired by Obama’s America’s College Promise, more than a dozen other colleges statewide are also advertising free tuition, extra advising and mentoring or expanded summer orientation programs for the coming academic year.”

Mission College in Santa Clara is giving $1,000 scholarships to local students — roughly equivalent to a year’s tuition — through a new program called Mission First. West Valley College in Saratoga is offering a tuition-free first semester to 600 local high school graduates. Skyline College in San Bruno touts a scholarship for recent high school graduates bearing the motto “Get in. Get through. Get out … on time!”

Municipal momentum

Policymakers in other big California cities have also put forth plans to bring down community college costs. In San Francisco, “Supervisor Jane Kim introduced a proposal to eliminate tuition for City College of San Francisco students and to help them cover the cost of books, transportation and child care,” Inside Higher Ed noted. “The Free City College Proposal would eliminate enrollment fees for all San Francisco residents and workers who work at least part time in the city. Students whose fees are already covered by financial aid would still be eligible for up to $1,000 in grants for textbooks, transportation and child care.”

The move came in the wake of Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti’s announcement, during his State of the City address, that he would raise $1.5 million for a new program paying the way of LAUSD grads for their first year of community college, “splitting its estimated initial $3 million cost with the district,” according to LAist. Because the Mayor of Los Angeles has no official control over city schools, the site added, “Garcetti’s role in the initiative appears to be purely advisory” beyond his fundraising effort, which will target philanthropic and business donors. 

Statewide legislation

In Sacramento, meanwhile, lawmakers considered the so-called California College Promise, which would allocate more financial aid toward ancillary costs of community college such as transportation and housing. Known as Assembly Bill 2681, the legislation would also “facilitate partnerships between community colleges and school districts to create more college preparatory courses for high school students” and “waive remediation classes for some students, therefore shortening their time to completion,” according to the Long Beach Post. The bill passed the state Assembly’s Committee on Higher Education last month.

The precarious financial position of the majority of in-state enrollees and students has begun to weigh heavily on administrators and policymakers, who hope to keep community colleges both solvent enough and sufficiently well attended to remain going. A recent report prepared by the Institute for College Access and Success suggested that as much as 61 percent of California community college students come from “very low income” families (defined as those earning under $30,000 a year), with over 55 percent, based on FAFSA calculations, “are not expected to contribute to college expenses,” as GoodCall observed. 

“It is time that big beverage companies dip into their millions of dollars of profits and help pay for the damage their products cause,” Mary Pittman, president of the Oakland-based Public Health Institute, told KQED. The $6 million to $12 million the tax would generate annually would be divvied up by an advisory panel for worthwhile public health programs, the PBS affiliate noted.

But there is no hard requirement on what the money be used for. As the San Jose Mercury-News reported, those tax dollars would go into the city of Oakland’s general fund — a detail that wasn’t included in some of the stories about the soda tax.

This infusion would come as Oakland continues to deal with decades of budget headaches. The Silicon Valley economic boom has had far fewer benefits for Oakland’s treasury than those seen in many neighboring cities and suburban communities.

The two-year, $2.4 billion budget approved by the Oakland City Council in June 2015 included money for 40 new police officers and pay “restoration” increases for some municipal employees. But pleas were rejected for extra funding to address and reduce child prostitution; improve programs for refugees; remedy quality-of-life issues; allow for longer hours at libraries and animal shelters; and more.

‘Financial time bomb’ hanging over city

On long-term pension liabilities, Oakland has a huge hole to dig out of because of its pioneering role in borrowing money — so-called pension obligation bonds — to cover pension payments in the presumption that investing the borrowed money would generate such high returns that they could both pay off the borrowing and pay for annual city pension contributions.

As it has periodically since 1985, in 2012, Oakland issued pension bonds — $212 million worth — so it wouldn’t have to make contributions again until fiscal 2016-17. The last budget includes new funding for pension obligations, but the overall problem remains a “financial time bomb,” as the San Francisco Chronicle described it in 2012. The city has continued to use these bonds even though the the investments they were used for haven’t come close to providing the hoped-for returns.

Oakland’s dire fiscal straits also explains city leaders’ disinterest in providing any help to the Oakland Raiders to prevent the storied NFL franchise from moving to Los Angeles, Las Vegas or San Antonio in coming years. As CalWatchdog reported last year, NFL officials were dismayed at Oakland’s unwillingness to provide the sort of help that San Diego was considering to keep the Chargers in town.

When it comes to help from the city, “there is no there, there,” ESPN’s John Clayton wrote in August.

CA has long history of tax bait-and-switch

Perhaps if Oakland voters approved the soda tax in November, the $6 million to $12 million it generated annually would be used for the exact sort of public health programs that advocates. But California has a long history of taxes and fees being pitched for one intended use and being used for another.

In 2011, Gov. Jerry Brown was successful in his push to shut down city redevelopment programs that diverted billions of dollars in local property taxes. Instead of being used to reduce blight, fund economic development and pay for affordable housing, then-Controller John Chiang found the funds were routinely used around the state to pay salaries of city officials, police officers and other government employees not in traditional agencies, as well as to pay for general administrative costs, a day-care center and more.

In 1998, California voters adopted Proposition 10, which imposed a 50-cents a pack tax on cigarettes. The proceeds were supposed to go strictly to early childhood education programs known collectively as “First 5.” But there has been little oversight and years of critical headlines about money being spent on projects having little to do with early childhood education.

In 2006, it was revealed that First 5 chairman Rob Reiner, the Hollywood director/producer, had used $18 million in taxpayer funds on a “preschool for all” TV ad campaign at the same time that he had launched a signature-gathering effort for a “preschool for all” initiative. Reiner and others faced allegations of misuse of public funds, but charges were never filed.

But in Oakland, the Mercury-News reports the list of prominent supporters for the Oakland soda tax is long and growing. So far, the list includes “state Sen. Loni Hancock, state Assembly members Rob Bonta and Tony Thurmond, Alameda County supervisors Wilma Chan and Keith Carson, Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf, Oakland school Superintendent Antwan Wilson and City Council members Lynette Gibson McElhaney and Desley Brooks.”

She says the California Democratic Party needs to be a national leader on issues. She said its elected officials aren’t totally representative of the party’s diversity. She said many prospective voters would rather Decline To State a party preference than become Democrats. She said the party “needs a revolution.”

Launch of Campaign

Kimberly Ellis, center, is pictured with husband James Fuller, left, and a supporter at her campaign launch event in San Francisco, Wednesday.

On Wednesday night she officially launched her campaign for state party chair in 2017 to succeed John Burton — and since Democrats have a tight grip on the state government and state politics, this race is kind of a big deal.

“This is about cultivating and grooming the next generation of political leadership that comes from California,” Ellis said to the crowd of about 200 friends, family and supporters. “And making sure … those people have the progressive values that Democrats have for fairness and equality.”

Ellis is the executive director of Emerge California, an organization that identifies, trains and encourages Democratic women to run for elected office. Many graduates of the program were in attendance Wednesday night, including Oakland’s mayor, Libby Schaaf.

The party chair helps raise money, recruit candidates, strategize in elections and serve, along with elected public officials, as a face of the party. And she’d rather focus on building the party than being a legislator herself.

Rise of Decline To State

“If we don’t take a minute to stop and step back and really look at what is going on with this Demographic shift — it isn’t just young folks between 18 and 24, it’s women and people of color who are registering as Declined To State than as Democrats — we are going to lose California,” Ellis told CalWatchdog.

Over recent years, the state has seen a rise in registered voters not stating a party preference. While Republican registration numbers have been declining for a while, Democrats have a much smaller and slower decrease. Since 2009, Democrats in the state have slipped from 44.5 percent to 43.2 of registered voters, while “decline to state” has risen about 3.6 percentage points.

Ask around about who Kimberly Ellis is and you’ll likely encounter her biggest hurdle: that outside the bay area, particularly in Southern California, she’s relatively unknown. And she’s running against Eric Bauman, who is not only well known, but has had a substantial head start in securing delegate support.

Bauman has been Los Angeles Party Chair for seven terms — where Democratic voter registration as a percentage of the electorate has slipped at a similar rate as statewide, but the total number of Democratic voters in L.A. has increased as opposed to statewide — and has been state vice chair since 2009. He’s been an advisor to many top officials, including the out-going Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins, D-San Diego.

Bauman announced his candidacy in December, and on Wednesday Politico reported that Bauman had “pledged support and endorsements from more than 550 official state Democratic Party delegates,” which is apparently more than one-third of the support necessary to win.

But the election is not for another year and Ellis is undeterred by the Politico data point, saying she plans on going to every county to speak with delegates to make her case.

“I’m not worried about numbers right now,” Ellis said. “Numbers can change.”

In San Diego, Mayor Kevin Faulconer has declared his strong support for keeping the Chargers in place and urged the NFL to not let the team leave for a proposed stadium in Carson that owner Dean Spanos hopes to jointly build and operate with Raiders owner Mark Davis. Even as Faulconer faces withering criticism from team stadium point man Mark Fabiani, the first-term Republican says he’s ready to ask voters if they support contributing hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds toward a billion-dollar-plus stadium.

In St. Louis, both Mayor Francis Slay and Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon have offered strong support for a new stadium, mostly paid for with taxpayer dollars, to either keep the Rams or to attract a new NFL team in case team owner Stan Kroenke succeeds with his bid to relocate the Rams to Inglewood.

But in Oakland, Mayor Libby Schaaf has not only strongly opposed the use of public funds for a stadium, she’s called the team stadium saga a “distraction.” Schaaf also hasn’t borrowed from the playbook of previous mayors who tried to keep their pro sports teams by using what might be called the guilt-trip approach — telling NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and other team owners of what an assault on decency it would be to allow the Raiders to leave, given their ardent and devoted fan base. Unlike Missouri and San Diego officials, who have met repeatedly with Goodell and a handful of influential team owners, Oakland’s elected leaders have done almost no direct lobbying of key NFL players.

Touting team’s ‘die-hard regional fan base’

Next week, however, that’s going to change. This is from the Bay Area News Group’s report in the Contra-Costa Times:

OAKLAND — City officials working to keep the Raiders in Oakland will travel to New York next week to give a presentation to the NFL about their funding plan for a new stadium.

 

Officials from cities in St. Louis and San Diego, the other two cities with professional football franchises threatening to leave for Southern California, will also be making their pitch to the NFL.

 

Mayor Libby Schaaf confirmed she will attend Wednesday’s meeting with the NFL’s Los Angeles stadium and finance committee. …

 

“We’ll show how everything from Oakland’s growing economic momentum and urban vitality to the team’s die-hard regional fan base make it clear that there is no better time for a major league team to be located in, or associated with Oakland,” Schaaf said in a statement.

A serious effort or a PR ploy?

But given that Schaaf hasn’t budged on her stand against public financing and continues to call Oakland’s crime rate and weak economy far bigger issues, her trip to New York is seen by many Raiders fans as a public-relations gambit, not a serious bid to urge the NFL to remain a presence in Oakland.

This view was underscored by ESPN’s John Clayton, one of the best-connected NFL reporters, who wrote Tuesday that the league didn’t take Oakland seriously:

As for Oakland, there is no there, there. The area doesn’t have a stadium offer on the table, and time is running out.

 

“We’ve said one thing consistently to any of the markets that have been engaged in trying to put forth a proposal, and it really rests on a couple of pillars,” said Eric Grubman, who is coordinating the league’s Los Angeles project. “One of them is that a proposal has to be specific. The second is that it has to be attractive to a team. The third is it has to be actionable. And so what actionable means is it can’t just be an idea to the extent that there is enabling legislation or enabling financing activities or there are litigation threats or anything of that nature — anything that needs to be assembled in a time frame where a club can act on it.

 

“Thus far, those sorts of tests have not been made in Oakland, so as of yet, there is no proposal for the Raiders to consider.”

“Terminal Logistics will start building the $250 million Oakland Bulk and Oversized Terminal at the Oakland Global Trade & Logistics Center later this year,” reported the San Jose Mercury News, “and hopes to finish the 35-acre project in 2017.”

Though potentially lucrative, the deal has sent California environmentalists into crisis mode. For years, environmental groups inside and outside the state have invested heavily in convincing public opinion that coal use is harmful and should be abandoned.

Scrambling opposition

Opponents of the coal deal have found themselves struggling to reverse its political momentum. In addition to familiar faces like the Sierra Club and groups like WildEarth Guardians, the Mercury News noted, Oakland’s own city leaders have voiced their dismay while leaving open the question of just how to proceed. “Obviously, we’re going to work with our business partners to try and reach a mutually acceptable way of moving forward,” said Mayor Libby Schaaf. “This is a very important project for the city of Oakland, and this policy resolution is important also.”

The difficulty in turning back the deal reached all the way to the White House, which sparked outrage among environmentalists by advancing a parallel initiative designed to market Utah’s coal. The proposal, which would put millions of tons of the resource on the auction block, drew an unhappy press release from WildEarth, Sierra Club and other organizations.

“Selling more coal portends disaster for our public lands, our climate and our clean energy future,” said Jeremy Nichols, WildEarth Guardians’ climate and energy program director. “While President Obama is calling for action to combat climate change, his administration seems to be doing everything they can to appease the coal industry and open the door for more carbon pollution.”

Looking to head off a wave of opposition, state officials backing the plan have underscored that Utah coal burns cleaner than the alternative in the Asian markets where it would be headed. Laura Nelson, director of the state’s Office of Energy Development, called the port project “an opportunity for those markets to displace dirtier coal with Utah coal, which has a lower sulfur and water content and higher BTU, which means it produces energy more efficiently.”

Market momentum

Defenders of the plan, meanwhile, also pointed out that coal transportation was just a first step in building a broader economic relationship.

Gordon Walker, chairman of Utah’s Permanent Community Impact Fund Board, told the Salt Lake Tribute that commodities ranging from alfalfa and grain to salt and iron ore could soon follow along the shipping line opened up by the coal deal.

“What we are doing is creating through-put for other commodities that are coming online. Potash is going to be a big deal,” Walker said, referring to the proposed Potash Ridge mine in Beaver County. “This benefits all of rural Utah. We have created a bigger pie.”

Given the sheer size and cots of the project, supporters like Walker had an incentive to emphasize the staying power of the new arrangement with Oakland. To ready the port that will receive the coal, the Tribute noted, Utah will spend over $50 million in federal mining royalties — allocated by the board, in the form of a low-interest loan, to the state’s most significant mining counties.

Costs and benefits

Like any major infrastructure venture, the port plan has offered Utahns a tradeoff between potential benefits and a certain level of risk. As in-state critics have observed, though the specific terms of the 66-year contract have yet to be hammered out, the full cost of port construction has been estimated to top out around $275 million.