Ann Ahlander
I'm a Utah native with genuine concerns for the Great Salt Lake and its ecosystems. Wetlands east of the lake provide sanctuary to tens of thousands of migrating birds each year and nesting sites for Canada geese and mallards, among others.

I have seen white pelicans take off from the shores of Farmington Bay over the Wasatch Mountains to Pine View Reservoir. I have seen raven nests the size of a small car. I have witnessed the noisy commotion of yellow headed blackbirds in the trees, which can be heard half a mile away. I have witnessed Canada geese courting -- a beautiful and touching sight.

In all my life, I never expected to see anything as ludicrous as a highway right smack dab through the middle of these wetlands. And my first impression of those who propose and support this highway is that they must not care much about wildlife. That they have lost a piece of their heart.

They call this Legacy Highway, but what kind of legacy are we leaving behind for our children, for our grandchildren? It is difficult to imagine, as you gaze onto the lake with mallards and gulls bobbing for shrimp, that such a peaceful scene could, in a few short years, be permanently altered by the noise and pollution of a four-lane superhighway.

I am here tonight to voice my outrage at such a proposal. You'll get the rest in writing. Thank you for your time.

Henry Armantrout
I'm 41 years old. I've lived in Utah for about 20 years. I'm a business owner in Salt Lake City.

I've spent countless days, thousands of hours out on the Great Salt Lake. In the past two years, I've had the opportunity to become a survey team member for the Western Hemisphere Migratory Shore Bird Team. I was given a little stretch of shore line out here on Farmington Bay to survey by air boat, and I have a private airboat.

During the summer months we count no less than 24 different species, 28 species some days, a total of 52 different species of migratory birds out on the Great Salt Lake. Some days in my little three-mile stretch -- again, this is just the eastern shore line of the lake -- we'll count in the neighborhood of 30,000 birds some days, and last year in a nine-day survey period we had over 98,000 birds. It's an incredible wetlands. It's quickly becoming the biggest ecosystem of migratory birds in America, if not the world.

In all these maps that I see, there's always a given shoreline, and I'll tell you the lake continually changes here; it ebbs or it comes down, and this year the shore line was probably at least a half a mile, maybe a mile further in to the Crystal Unit area.

Shorebirds utilize different depths of water, from the birds with long legs, the ducks and the grebes and the Western Clark grebes, they use the deeper water where they can fish. But when you get into the Piper species, they'll use from just an inch of water to just the, say, line mud flats. And that's how diverse it is.

With the lake rising as it is now, I can tell you a lot of the marsh grass is dying, and this year the Turpin Dike was almost overflowed. And when that happens, all that marsh grass will die. And I'm already starting to see it out there. Where the lake level is now, with the normal snow year it's going to come real close to overflowing that dike. And it's not going to leave much habitat and cover for much of the shorebirds. They're going to need that more upland marsh area, you know where they're proposing this highway.

A lot of people don't know this, but in the wintertime when the lake freezes and you have all the migratory fowl coming down --I'm talking swans, tundra swans, some trumpeters, you have the geese, northern pintails, mallards, gadwalls, American widgeons hang out, but hundreds of thousands of these migratory fowl, they'll go out onto the frozen lake during the day and rest, but at night they come in by the tens of thousands for the cover and the feed of this marshland. And it's a critical habitat for all of these fowl.

And to divide this wetland, it's wrong. And that's what I want to say, it is wrong. And I am an authority of the wetlands. I have spent so much time out there and I know it, I see it change. I've been out there from the early springtime through the winter months, I see it year round. And I can tell you that this is wrong, this alternative is wrong, and they need to push it as far east as possible. It needs to be as far east as possible.

I'm not saying the road shouldn't be built, but it needs to go as far east as possible, and if they can diverge back into Alternative A past Farmington Bay, then they need to do that. But so far I have seen no convergence. It's like no, this is not acceptable, A is not acceptable, we need C, the closest line to the lake. And they don't want to do any changing to it.

And I think they also need to look at more mass transit alternatives. It works in Europe. People learn to use it. And to just build a highway over such a great marshland is so shortsighted and it's wrong. And it's wrong for the future of this state. And I can tell you I'm not going to be living much longer, what have I got, 20 more years to live?

And I'm thinking way beyond that. It's taken millions of years to form that marshland, and for people that have never seen it, it's a very difficult place to get to, but to count over 30,000 birds of 26, 28 species in one single day, and that is any day during the summer months, it's incredible, totally incredible.

I offered the governor a ride out on my airboat several times, never got a call back. Eventually I got a call back, and an appointee was sent out with me on the lake. We showed that man over 30,000 birds that day, including a peregrine falcon eating either a mallard or gadwall up on the shore line. We had hundreds and hundreds of white pelicans in front of the airboat, a mirror glass day, it was a beautiful day. And I find that only a memo was put across the governor's desk. It didn't even justify a personal conversation between this man and the governor. And I can tell you I know where that memo went. It probably went straight into the garbage can.

The Governor tells me he doesn't have time to go out with me, and then I see him riding across the 27th South bridge in his car. And all's I asked was three hours of his time, and I gave him a year in advance, and he can't even give me three hours of his time to go see one of the most beautiful places on the earth.

And people just think it's a barren wasteland, but I can tell you it's a beautiful, beautiful place, a place that should be preserved forever and for the country and for Utah. Forever.

That's what I have to say. I'm pretty emotional about it because I love it out there. And I go out there and, you know, it blows people away. And I can tell you, Mr. Joe Brown was speechless that day when I took him out there. I don't know what else to tell you guys.

But this highway is wrong, and if they are going to build it, they need to push it as far east as possible and leave that habitat undisturbed. Because when that marsh dies, when it floods, those birds are going to need every little bit they can get. Take a drive out there right now. Drive out to Farmington, just look across the horizon and look at all the tens and hundreds of thousands of mallards that sit out on that lake and watch them in the evenings. Where do they go?

They fly into that marsh, and that marsh is funded by sportsmen, and waterfowl hunting is a managed resource. But also all the other species of migratory fowl utilize it as well. And it needs to be preserved. Thanks.

Keith Bartholemew
Good evening. My name is Keith Bartholemew. For purposes of identification only, I am Associate Director of the Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources and the Environment at the U of U School of Law.

I am here tonight representing only myself to express my personal concerns about the Legacy Highway and the DEIS. My main concern with the DEIS and the entire process that has been driving the Legacy Highway is the extremely limited focus that has been used for defining the need and purpose behind the project and the range of alternatives considered to address it.

The need and purpose statements assume consistent levels of growth in the North Corridor, regardless of whether the Legacy is built or not.

The unstated assumption is that building highways has no effect on development patterns, on where people choose to live and do business. But as everyone knows, if you can't get from here to there, you're not likely to go there.

As is recognized by the Strategic Advisory Committee for Trunk Assessment in the U.K. and the Transportation Resource Board here in the U.S., building new highways that provide increased access to vacant land near urban areas inevitably leads to early development of those lands. Given the current state of most suburban zoning codes, this means sprawl. Even the DEIS recognizes this.

The summary chapter uses potentially developable land as a primary measure for assessing the several possible highway alignments. Make no mistake, this highway is about lining the pockets of a few fat-cat landowners and developers. Yet the DEIS assumes the same growth patterns for the no build and all the build alternatives.

In similar fashion, the range of alternatives studied suffers from the same myopia. Short shrift is given to non-highway options, such as TDM, TSM, and transit. As Professor Adler has already stated, the DEIS makes substantial errors in underestimating the role transit can play in addressing access needs in the North Corridor.

As important as the DEIS's failure to consider options on the way our region grows in the future, none of the alternatives consider ways in which growth may be accommodated that would make transit service more accessible and convenient to a much larger segment of the population. Options that, as we speak, are being developed and evaluated by the Envision Utah process.

Yet as Envision Utah is considering these options, the Legacy Highway DEIS assumes a future of continued auto-oriented sprawl. Constructing the highway would damn us to suffer that future.

The underlying assumption is that sprawl is inevitable, that it is one of those inalienable rights listed by Thomas Jefferson: Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and the ability to find a parking place at the mall the day after Thanksgiving.

People don't want sprawl. Yes, many dream of home ownership, but that does not mean they necessarily are in favor of faceless subdivision pods. What they desire is a bit of small-town America. That's a vision that can be provided in a way that does not mean more sprawl and highways.

I'm offended by the asumption that equates the American dream with sprawl. People don't want sprawl, they want community.

In Portland, Oregon, I was the director of a project that explored using good community planning and transit as an alternative to building a new freeway. Our study, known as LUTRAQ, showed that building good neighborhoods eliminated the need for the freeway. And the freeway was canceled.

Everything I've seen shows that similar results could be achieved here. Let's build communities, not highways.

Elizabeth Chipman
I feel there are better solutions to the transportation needs of the Wasatch Front than the Legacy Highway. We need to develop some self-sufficient small regional areas with services and bike paths and walking paths, and we need to have a really good mass transit system.

The air quality problems on the Wasatch Front will not permit us to simply build lots of highways. We need to start allocating funds now for and plan for mass transit systems much more rapid than light rail, and more extensive in scope.

If we commit all the funds to building freeways from this time forward, we will never have a mass transit system, nor will we begin to think about effective planning and structuring of population areas and services. We will put it off, just as we put off revamping the I-15 freeway until the last possible moment. Then it will be too late, and we will have terrible health problems and very ineffective and stagnant traffic flow problems.

By refusing to look at the Legacy Freeway as the solution at this present moment, we can begin to change the paradigm in people's thinking toward a commitment to mass transit and other forms of transportation.

Several members of my family have had chronic lung disease, and I know that in the future many others will have chronic lung problems due to air pollution, if we don't start acting now. Real changes in people's thinking come only when it becomes very necessary. Otherwise, people revert to the old habits because they are easier. It will be very hard for all of us to change our thinking away from highways and all the problems. Please take the challenge and begin to do this planning now.

Also, I believe we cannot afford to damage ecosystems for the animals of the earth. I think it's morally insensitive and unnecessary.

Lynn deFreitas
My name is Lynn deFreitas. I am the president of Friends of Great Salt Lake. My comments are directed to the proposed Legacy West Davis Highway project.

The Great Salt Lake ecosystem is part of the western hemispheric shorebird reserve network. Not the northern hemispheric shorebird reserve network, as stated in the DEIS.

This significant oversight is indicative of the consistency with which UDOT has ignored the complexity of and the necessity of the basic nuts and bolts dynamic of the Great Salt Lake ecosystem.

Much like the inextricable link of the heart to the body or the arm to the fingers, Great Salt Lake is a living system. The intrinsic importance of the lake to its surrounding wetlands and uplands would be severed by a highway running through its flood plain.

A highway with an untold amount of fill required for its road base. And the source of this fill material not even mentioned in the DEIS. A highway that will create habitat fragmentation, induce development in the flood plain, generate noise, pollution, wildlife mortality, and increased human encroachment into the habitat of millions of shorebirds and waterfowl that rely on this oasis for their breeding, resting, and feeding.

We know that only about 1.5 percent of the state's total land area is wetlands. Given that level of rarity, 75 percent of Utah wetlands, over 500,000 acres, are found in and along the shores of Great Salt Lake.

We also know that there has been a dramatic decline in wetland habitats in Utah over the past 24 years. From nearly 1.2 million acres in the 1950s to approximately 558,000 acres in 1974.

The proposed highway would cause further destruction of these globally important wetlands, to an extent which has yet to be determined.

Although the Great Salt Lake is a large body of water, as much as 90 percent of bird use is concentrated along the southeastern shore. Because of the variety of marsh, mud flat, and upland habitats found there.

The Great Salt Lake's longest and most productive wetland area is on the southeast shore of the lake. The area known as Farmington Bay creates a continuity of more than 20,000 acres of productive wetlands that include private sanctuaries, the State managed Farmington Bay Waterfowl Area, private clubs and the bird refuge. The proposed highway will encircle much of this area, destroying 160 acres for its own footprint.

Much like breathing, the wetlands along the shores of Great Salt Lake rely on the dynamic back-and-forth movement of the lake across its flood plain, the shifting mosaics of landscape features and wildlife habitats that vary seasonally and annually define the natural course of a functioning wetland's ecosystem. The free exchange of water, dissolved elements and compounds, and particulate retention provides a periodic cleansing and renewal of the land.

Not only does the DEIS fail to address any secondary impacts the highway would have on this dynamic; it blatantly excludes a wealth of other secondary impact considerations necessary to fully describe the scope of this project and its real effect on an ecosystem.

Friends of Great Salt Lake supports the Army Corps of Engineers in its adherence to the Section 404 guidelines. We believe the Legacy Highway West Davis Highway project is not a least damaging alternative by any stretch of the imagination, and we urge the Army Corps not to permit this project. Thank you.

Edward C. Fisher
I have been following the development of plans for the Legacy Highway - especially the Davis County portion - since the highway was first proposed. I understand that there is a need for increased transportation capacity through this portion of Davis County to handle commuter traffic to and from points south. I do not believe that UDOT's proposal of building a four lane limited access highway, no matter what the alignment, is the best solution to this problem in the long term. The State of Utah and UDOT must stop looking for quick fixes and begin to look at more modern solutions to our transportation problems. I have detailed my concerns below.

1. The proposed Davis County portion of the Legacy Highway is intended to solve a commuter problem. The reason that a problem exists in Davis County today is because this area was relatively uncrowded for many years and was an easy commute to points south where many residents of this area are employed. This situation has obviously changed. If another highway is built to accommodate this increased demand, then demand will again increase to the point that congestion will dominate. This mistake has been made before in many cities throughout the country, most notably Los Angeles. Furthermore, I don't believe that a short term solution like this is the best use of taxpayer money.

2. Alternative C, the preferred alignment of the Davis County portion of the Legacy Highway constitutes an unacceptable encroachment on the wetlands west of the I-15 corridor through Farmington and Centerville. The wetlands around the Great Salt Lake have already lost too much ground to development. The most recent loss was due to the new runway at the Salt Lake City International Airport. Your charts state that only 0.14 percent of the wetlands in the southern portion of the Great Salt Lake will be impacted by this highway. This is a loss of wetlands and the number is also misleading as you only include the area occupied by the highway itself. I'm certain that birds will not be nesting adjacent to the highway - they likely won't be nesting within several hundred feet of the highway. A recent news item in the Salt Lake Tribune regarding a bird cholera epidemic that killed thousands of birds attributed the epidemic in part to stress caused by loss of habitat. This means that bird populations along the shores of the Great Salt Lake already have too little habitat. Furthermore, the impact on any wildlife that happens to venture too close to the highway will not just be loss of habitat but loss of life. A final point here, the state promises that no development will occur along the Alternative C route. The state has been unable to restrain or direct development elsewhere and I don't believe that it will be any different here.

3. The State of Utah has encouraged, whether by design or by oversight, dependence on automobiles for all of our transportation needs. This cannot continue. By all accounts, Utah's population is projected to continue to grow at a rapid rate into the middle of the 21st century. At some point in the near future, reliance on the automobile is going to become impractical. There is very little emphasis on mass transit in solving these transportation problems. I can tell you from experience that the existing mass transit solution for this area is inadequate. The buses that UTA runs through this area are unreliable and very time consuming and therefore appeal to only a small segment of the commuting population. People are naturally economical. If they are presented with a commuting alternative that is reliable and time efficient they will use it. There is an opportunity here to make an investment in the future.

4. Finally, I am concerned that by encouraging more automobiles on the road, our air quality will continue to be a problem. I commute the ten miles to my place of employment by bicycle approximately 75% of the time. I experienced a sore throat and cough during several periods of poor air quality this past summer. I find it ironic that a state with so much concern for the health of its citizens that it bans the smoking of tobacco indoors does very little to improve the quality of the air that we breathe all the time.

Kristin Gilbert
I am co-president of Terra Firma, the Environmental Organization of the University of Utah. I am here speaking tonight on behalf of concerned students at the University of Utah.

As we are moving into a new century, growth in this state has become a very important issue to us. Some believe that Legacy Highway is a necessary solution to growth along the Wasatch Front. We, members of the generation that will be left to deal with growth in the next millennium, are afraid that current necessary solutions are only temporary fixes that will create larger problems later.

Quality of life in this valley is also very important to us, and Legacy Highway is not a solution that will improve quality of life. UDOT contends that building more roads will reduce traffic congestion and improve air quality. Communities all around the world have learned that more highways mean more sprawl, more cars, and more air pollution in the long run.

We demand that both the 404 and EIS must seriously consider other more sustainable solutions such as wise land use and transportation planning, focusing more heavily on mass transit and compact pedestrian and bicycle friendly communities.

A healthy, sustainable ecosystem in this valley is also very important to us. The Great Salt Lake ecosystem as a refuge for millions of migratory shore birds is a crucial asset to out state and any development that compromises the integrity of this ecosystem should not be allowed. Legacy Highway is one of those developments. Wetlands mitigation should not even be an option. Legally, the Army Corps of Engineers must consider avoidance of wetlands impacts first and foremost.

Legacy Highway is only a necessary solution to those who can't see past the end of their noses, it is not an environmentally friendly solution, it is a shortsighted economic solution, and it merely demonstrates the inadequacy of current leadership to deal responsibly with the population and economic growth of this state.

We, as the future of this state, demand that our leaders re-evaluate Legacy Highway as a viable solution to this state's growth. It is not viable and will only magnify the same problems we have now, leaving bigger problems for us to fix later.

Daniel V. Schroeder
Proponents of the Legacy Highway say that they don't want to build it, but they have to. They say the population of the Wasatch Front is doubling every 30 years, therefore we need more freeways.

I agree that we'll have a lot more people here in 50 years, but people and cars are not the same thing. I am for people and against cars. More precisely, the only way to accommodate more people, in an environment that's fit to live in, is to do away with cars as a daily necessity of life; to design communities in which you don't need a car to get to work or to school or to the grocery store.

This environmental impact statement is a joke, because the possibility of putting new homes closer to stores and work places is not even considered. This is partly because our governor feels that, as a matter of principle, the state should not be involved in land use planning decisions. But his position is inconsistent. Obviously, he feels that the state must be involved in planning new roads; why not also plan the communities that these roads will serve?

I work in Ogden at Weber State University. You would think that a state university, of all places, would take the lead in encouraging commuters to use alternative transportation. You know what they do? They sell on-campus parking passes for less than the cost of writing parking tickets, and they offer free parking only a short distance from the campus. The cost of paving and maintaining the lots is paid for by our taxes. In other words, we subsidize automobiles, encouraging students to drive who might otherwise have taken the bus or found an apartment closer to campus. Before saying that we need to build more freeways, let's do away with these subsidies and see whether people don't find ways to drive less.

One more comment. This EIS is also a joke because it deals only with a tiny segment of the entire proposed Legacy Highway--only about 10 percent of the total of more than 100 miles. When politicians can't make you swallow a distasteful new project all at once, they try to feed it to you in small bits.

Taken as a whole, the Legacy Highway would be devastating, not just to open space and wetlands, but more importantly, to the quality of life in our neighborhoods and communities. By giving the illusion of mobility, it would encourage even more sprawl-style growth in which homes, schools, shops, offices, and factories are scattered far and wide. It would imprison the next generation in automobiles and condemn them to a life of driving to and fro through an endless suburban wasteland.

Gibbs Smith
I'm Gibbs Smith. I live in West Kaysville. I've lived there for 20 years.

When I was a child, I used to take the Bamberger train to Salt Lake City. I lived in Kaysville at that point too. And my quality of life was better because of the ability to go on the highway or to go on the Bamberger train.

Many people who lived in Kaysville at that point worked in Salt Lake. They took the train. And it was used. It was a very comfortable way to go to Salt Lake City.

In a way, I feel like I'm speaking for my neighbors. If you go through my neighborhood of West Kaysville, you'll see many small farms, you'll see subdivisions, you'll see people who like a rural lifestyle.

You'll also see all over the place "Stop Legacy Highway" signs. So those people that I'm surrounded by, in my opinion, the majority would not like to see this highway built.

I personally feel that having the Great Salt Lake in my backyard is an advantage to my lifestyle. I hike to the lake shore. I enjoy the bird life. When I'm down there, all I hear are bird calls. I see the eagles, I see the wildlife. It makes me feel good to live there because of that.

So to the gentleman who spoke about the mosquitoes and all of that, I live there, I participate in the ecosystem, and I enjoy it.

The Legacy Highway, in my opinion, would make noise pollution, air pollution, construction pollution, feeder road pollution, and change the whole character of where I live.

But because I live there, I care about transportation. Because I go to Salt Lake a lot. So what I would like to suggest is an alternative, a very good commuter rail system along the I-15 corridor or along the UP corridor.

And I feel we should immediately get support to divert some of the gasoline tax to go to support that. I feel like not using gasoline tax for mass transit is really a sin of our generation. Because all we're doing is increasing the probability that all we'll get are more highways because we don't properly fund an alternative. And I think we should fund an alternative.

I'd like to use the last 30 seconds of my time to just ask those here to please stand up, all of those opposed to the highway. I would like to take a straw poll. [People standing]

I feel that really -- if you asked all of the people in Utah if you could get them in one room, I think you would see the same response. I think you would see the majority of the people of Utah opposed to this. Thank you.

Greg Underwood
Approximately two years ago, Representative Jim Hansen responded to a member of the media, referring to the Legacy Highway and the people of Utah, "I don't care what they want, they're going to get it."

Since then, the governor and the DOT have spoken with ceaseless rhetoric concerning the Legacy Highway. Yet you have not cogently addressed or intelligently answered the fundamental question of, why?

Why do you think we, the taxpaying citizens of Utah, need this highway? This project has not been chosen as a priority by the people of Utah and our families. In fact, until this evening, we have had absolutely no say in the matter and have not been able to debate the question of need.

A common economic model is that of "Cost vs. Benefit" analysis. So far no one in the governor's cadre of staff has been able to, or to my knowledge, even tried to establish a measurable benefit of this highway to the people of Utah and our children, who will have to live with its real legacy in the future.

All you can project with any defensible rationale or science is the estimated cost of the highway, because, at this point, the only people who will stand to gain in any measurable way are the governor, the DOT and the contractors who would stand to make hundreds of millions of dollars in profits. The DOT has already realized $27 million in budget this year alone. The rest of us will have to suffer through more than 20 years of construction and the physical division of our neighborhood communities by yet another ribbon of concrete.

Let me use your own estimate of cost as an illustrative argument. You have estimated the median cost of the Legacy Highway to be $6.5 billion. Using simple sixth grade mathematics, here is an example of an alternative to building the highway.

Let's say we start out with half of the $6.5 billion and dedicate it to transportation. If we use a cost of $250,000 per bus and we purchase 1,000 additional buses (over and above what we already have) it would cost $250 million. If we then hire 1,000 bus drivers at the handsome salary of $100,000 per year, we could pay them that salary for 30 years using only half of the projection.

If we take the other half of the money you project to spend, we could invest it in our children's future, which is, after all, the real future or the state. If we spent $10 million per school to build 100 new schools, it would cost $1 billion. If we then hired 1,000 teachers at the same salary as the bus drivers, we could pay them $100,000 per year for 23 years. Now, that, Governor Leavitt, would be a truly enduring legacy. Can you imagine what all those superbly educated minds could do for future generations and the state of Utah? The monetary return and financial gains, not to mention the societal gains, to the state and the future of our children are legion and could be estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars, whereas the highway option represents only costs, no returns. For as we are all painfully aware with I-15, highways require reconstruction and maintenance costs.

If you build the Legacy Highway, it will continue to cost us, the taxpayers of Utah, more and more money. Eventually we will have the legacy of the "Legacy" reconstruction, along with I-215, Bangerter Highway, and 20 years from now yet another I-15 reconstruction.

Along with it, we will have more congestion, not less, and significantly more air pollution. Take a look at Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, Seattle, Chicago, New York Boston, Atlanta, St. Louis, Miami. Have more highways and ever bigger highways helped them with congestion and pollution? They have if you think congestion and pollution are good things. This highway isn't just an ill-conceived, bad idea. It is a monumentally ludicrous idea.

Ivan Weber
We know that white men can't jump. But UDOT needs to jump a heck of a lot higher than it has to look at its proposal in a regional and global context. We need to expand our view of it to longer time frames in order to understand the phenomenon that's being considered here. Which is a terrible act of destruction.

The DEIS fails to consider adequately large scale, long-term impacts on almost every level. The DEIS analysis of secondary and cumulative impacts, especially on environment, is woefully deficient, and the casualties are first wildlife, and second, human quality of life.

The restriction of our perception to the study area, quote-unquote, is a reprehensible instrument of destruction, in effect. We must see the entire proposal from one end to the other where it cannot possibly be understood accurately.

First, the air quality claims are preposterous. The consequences in turn are regional and global, as well as local, as you've heard earlier. While stating that the capacity for traffic will be increased dramatically, the DEIS claims that the criteria pollutants will be decreased. While in fact, the opposite is bound to occur.

As VMTs increase with -- population is projected to reach five million in the Wasatch Front area by 2050. NOX, COs, VOCs, and PM-2.5 or 2.10 and other exhaust products are bound to emerge as regional haze, and the consequent mobilization of metals into surface and groundwater from this acidification, nitrogen loading in forests and high country water bodies and distant farmland deterioration hundreds of miles eastward. Global climate change will accelerate due to energy converted to greenhouse gas by traffic induced by this highway.

Growth on the west side of the Salt Lake Valley and Utah Lake's west flank, an area at least 200 square miles, will have the fuse lit on its population bomb by the Legacy Highway. It's a segment that's intended to connect to 5600 West, we have to remember. It's being spoken of in about every other context in exactly that manner. It should have been analyzed in its entirety. But it's not been done at all.

Wildlife is my greatest regret about this proposal, however. The Legacy Parkway project is designed to increase capacity, but it will succeed in nothing so well as drastically decreasing the carrying capacity of a place for wildlife. And it's critical wildlife that is globally significant.

Habitat fragmentation effects reportedly analyzed. I call your attention to the latest issue of Conservation Biology, the October issue, the article on the importance of small wetlands. Over a longer time frame, we see the east flank of the Great Salt Lake as a dynamic transition zone changing ecological functions constantly as it changes from fresh to saline, deep aquatic to shallow to dry to upland, aerobic to anaerobic as the lake rises and falls, reaching over a dramatically changed shoreline.

One of the most ridiculous parts of the DEIS is the biogeochemistry treatise under the HDDM analysis in one of the appendices. It fails to analyze the link of nitrobiology and nutrient cycling and food on hydrology. What happens when seep flow is engineered into channels? It's a zone in which a mosaic of dynamic floral changes occur over temporal cycles of all imaginable time scales.

The Legacy is the end of change to this ecosystem. The only alternative is no build. And I think you simply have to press forward toward that end. No build. No build.

Terry Tempest Williams
I have tried to remain calm. I have tried to remain optimistic. I have tried to find the wisdom behind building another road to our future along the Wasatch Front.

After poring over the documents printed by the Department of Transportation and those coming out of the Governor's office, I can no longer remain silent. The Legacy Highway is a bad idea. It is an extreme example of urban radicalism, urban radicalism defined as actions taken in the name of paving development without thought to the long-term effect on the psychological and physical well-being of its residents.

Do we really need another road?

The proponents of the Legacy Highway tell us we do. They tell us it will provide a more efficient means of travel from Davis County to Salt Lake, that it will give us greater speed into city, cut down on the possibility of gridlock, that it will provide the necessary link to the modernization of Utah.

Why then, is it against the law?

The Legacy Highway is against the law because it will destroy hundreds of acres of wetlands -- wetlands that provide habitat for tens of thousands of migrating birds, and that buffer the already-developed lands to the east from the lake's natural cycles of flooding. Under the Clean Water Act, wetlands are protected from development if there are other alternatives that would cause less harm to these critical ecosystems. It is for this reason the Army Corps of Engineers is having serious problems with the construction of the road.

There are other alternatives. Friends of Great Salt Lake and the Sierra Club have offered a practical alternative that the road-builders refuse to consider seriously: Help people to drive less by bringing jobs closer to where they live and by providing better transit systems. Other regions have found that more roads just fuel more sprawl and more traffic congestion, while smarter planning and a better mix of transportation services allows a thriving economy but less traffic, a healthier environment, more open space and a better quality of life. Alternative A places the highway closest to existing development nearest the mountains. Alternative B places the highway in the vein of the existing freeway. Alternative C places the highway nearest the marshes and shores of the Great Salt Lake. It is the most destructive option, not the least. This is the option the Department of Transportation and the Governor are proposing for the state of Utah.

The Nature Conservancy has opposed Alternative C.

Dreams and visions of paving the eastern periphery of the Great Salt Lake is like asphalting the Serengeti Plains in Africa. For those who have ventured into the wetlands surrounding Great Salt Lake and felt the grace of wings, raised their eyes to a full sky of birds and seen the sheer numbers of avocets and stilts, ibises and egrets fly over them, replacing this avian peace and sanctuary with a thoroughfare for automobiles in the name of efficiency is unimaginable. I keep thinking, do the birds know we are planning their demise, that this is what we will call our legacy?

Sigurd Olson tells a story of walking near the shores of Lake Superior with an Indian tracker in the l940s. His guide stopped him midstep and put his finger to his ear. ``Listen, can you hear?'' Olson heard nothing ``Can't you hear it now?'' the guide asked again. ``It is very plain tonight.'' Olson writes, ``I stood there with him and listened, but heard nothing, and as I watched the amused and somewhat disappointed look on his face, I wondered if he was playing a game with me. . . I believe that he actually heard something and that the reason I could not was that this was music for those ears that were attuned.''

Sigurd Olson then goes on to say, ``One night in the south of Germany I was walking along the River Main in Frankfurt. It was spring and sunset. Behind me were the stark ruins of the city, the silhouettes of broken walls and towers, the horrible destruction of the bombing. Across the river was a little village connected with the city by the broken span of a great bridge. In the river were the rusting hulls of barges and sunken boats. The river gurgled softly around them and around the twisted girders of the blown-up span. It was a scene of desolation and sadness.

``Then I was conscious of a sound that was not of the war, the hurrying whisper of wings overhead. I turned, and there against the rosy sky was a flock of mallards. I had forgotten the river was a flyway, that there were still such delightful things as the sound of wings at dusk, rice beds yellowing in the fall, and the soft sound of quacking all through the night.

``A lone flock of mallards gave all that to me, awoke a thousand memories as wilderness music always does. We have wildness adjacent to a city on the shores of the Great Salt Lake.'' For those of us who are lifetime residents of Salt Lake City, we know what we have lost already in terms of a sane lifestyle in the name of growth.

Our city is torn up, our streets are clogged, and we sit in our cars, as we try to solve our growing pains with a new freeway system, anticipating not only the 2002 Olympics but a sure and secure future with a rising population.

As a city and as a people we are trying to meet these challenges with intelligence, creativity, and patience.

I wonder if in the process, we have forgotten the possibility of restraint.

What I want to say is this: The Great Salt Lake has saved my life more than once as a place of refuge. And I am not alone. Farmington Bay, the Layton Marshes, Antelope Island, the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge are all places of peace revered by many. They nourish our souls alongside the birds who feed, nest, and dwell there. We cannot afford to lose one more acre of these wetlands that sparkle and sing. We cannot afford the seduction offered by the Department of Transportation that all will be well in Zion if we just construct one more road.

Los Angeles teaches us more roads only lead to more cars and greater anxiety. A marsh's biological niche is to filter impurities through the very roots of cattails and bulrushes. Pull them, pave them, and we have begun a process of corruption, even our own.

The birds, every last one of them who inhabit the green shores of this inland sea, who have traveled thousands of miles through the harshest of weather from Alaska to Argentina, are feathered blessings to each of us. They teach us how to survive in the midst of change. If we choose to diminish the health and integrity of the Great Salt Lake ecosystem which includes hundreds of species of birds and literally, millions of individuals who migrate to the adjoining wetlands annually, because our sight and sentiment is focused more on what we can build rather than what we can conserve, I fear an impoverishment of the soul that will not only diminish a quality of life along the Wasatch Front, but a quality of spirit.

Down the road, above the roar of traffic, it will be the plaintive cries of the long-legged birds that will remind us of our spiritual connection to the land. It will be these birds, the angels of Great Salt Lake, who will save us from the crash and crunch of overdevelopment, not the legacy of another highway.