This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

The idea of a port in the San Francisco Bay where Utah coal could ship to Asia lives on, but mainly in the minds of the people who wanted it all along. For the rest of us, it's time to figure out if stuff like this is where the state should place its bets.

The decision by four Utah counties to withdraw their $53 million loan application to the state's Permanent Community Impact Board came with assurances that the counties are still very much interested in the plan. They went so far as to say that the withdrawal was something of a formality because of changes to the way it would be funded.

Still, they indicated it would be at least a year before any new application came, and there is reason to believe the dream will only fade further over the next year. The port project has been voted down by the city council of the city that would host it. The port developers hinted that they may sue the city over that, but no suit has been forthcoming. That may be because, outside of Utah's $53 million, backers of the $250 million project haven't ever said they have anyone else besides Utah ponying up.

Meanwhile, the same forces causing coal demand to plummet are still at work. Even in Asia, where coal-fired power plants still get built, there is a softening in the market that makes the economics of shipping Utah coal by rail and then by sea dicey at best. There are much closer coal producers likely willing to underbid Utah's producers.

And, as if economics were not enough, now comes a new public opinion poll that shows a slight majority of Utahns think the coal port is a bad idea. In a Utah Policy poll, only 24 percent of Utahns were in favor of it, while 51 percent were opposed.

That opinion is important because Utah's legislators last session decided to make the four counties' coal dream the whole state's dream. Or at least they put the state up as the facilitator, creating the "throughput infrastructure fund" that would pay the port funding and then recover the money from mineral lease funds.

So what happens now? For starters, how about we decide once and for all what the mineral lease money going to the Community Impact Board is really for? For decades, it was used to mitigate the impacts of mineral development (mainly oil, gas and coal) in the counties where that happens. It has built roads and fire stations and other public improvements.

The coal port turned that purpose on its head by instead using it to facilitate more mineral extraction, essentially keeping the mineral money flowing so they have impacts to mitigate in the future, or so it is hoped.

At this point, it should be noted that the vast majority of the state's economic development subsidies are not just straight cash. The Governor's Office of Economic Development hands out millions in subsidies, but they are all "post-performance." The companies first have to demonstrate they produced more tax revenue, then they'll get some of that revenue back. Even in the case of development projects like the much-debated Facebook data center, the incentives come in the form of future tax breaks. If the taxes don't come, neither do the breaks.

But in this case, the state is willing to assume a gigantic risk in the name of economic development. Even if the port gets built, the future of coal exports will be anything but certain, but the $53 million will be gone. In our risk-averse state, why is this an acceptable gamble?