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Lawyers fighting Utah oil trains expect Trump to issue executive order soon
Upper Gore Canyon of the Colorado River from Amtrak’s California Zephyr in March — a remote canyon where an oil spill or wildfire would be very hard to reach (David O. Williams photo).
President Donald Trump is poised to issue an executive order fast-tracking the Uinta Basin Railway that could lead to an additional 350,000 barrels of oil per day rattling along the Union Pacific tracks that hug the endangered Colorado River for 100 miles, including in Eagle County.
“I had heard that something might come out this past week and nothing came out, and now there’s speculation there that an executive order might be issued next week,” Nate Hunt, a partner at the national law firm Kaplan Kirsch, said in a phone interview with RealVail.com. Hunt, an environment and litigation attorney, led Eagle County’s lawsuit to derail the Utah oil trains.
On Thursday at 10 a.m., the chief proponents of the Uinta Basin Railway – Utah’s Seven County Infrastructure Coalition — will hold a public hearing on the group’s May 8 resolution to seek $2.4 billion in federally-subsidized tax-exempt bonds to finance the railway. Funding by that federal vehicle typically is reserved for public transportation of people, not commodities, and Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser has previously opposed the funding scheme.
According to an attorney for one of the environmental plaintiffs in the Eagle County case – Ted Zukoski of the Center for Biological Diversity – the project’s multi-billion-dollar costs have ballooned by more than $400 million over the last two years, with a shrinking pool of less than $600 million available for U.S. Department of Transportation tax-exempt bonds.
According to an email Wednesday from Zukoski: “The railway backers expect President Trump to issue an executive crder as soon as next week instructing federal agencies to expedite their processes evaluating the railway following the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling, and directing agencies to reach new decisions approving the railway within 30 days.”
That lawsuit challenging the 2021 U.S. Surface Transportation Board’s 2021 approval of the proposed 88-mile Uinta Basin Railway, which also included five environmental groups, was successful at the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. in 2023. That ruling was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which late last month ruled broadly in favor of project proponents in terms of the proximate impacts of infrastructure in the National Environmental Policy Act.
Hunt says the appellate court agreed with Eagle County that the STB did not adequately look into the risks of wildfires and oil spills in the remote canyons of the Colorado River that would result from quintupling the amount of oil traveling along the Union Pacific rail line. The Supreme Court sent the case back to the D.C. Court of Appeals, which could now remand the case back to the STB and will likely want to hear more from the litigants.
“I anticipate that the Court of Appeals is going to want to hear from the parties on the Supreme Court’s decision, which only addresses two narrow issues of a larger decision, wherein the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals found multiple violations of multiple federal laws,” Hunt said.
He is not certain what impact a Trump executive order might have on the case.
“It’s hard to tell without seeing an executive order, but there’s nothing that the Trump administration can do that overrides the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals decision, so that’s one aspect,” Hunt said. “So, we’re going to wait to receive direction from the Court of Appeals. They could do a lot of different things.”
The office of Colorado Attorney General Weiser, which filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court in support of Eagle County and environmental groups, vowed to stay vigilant in the wake of the Supreme Court’s NEPA ruling.
“The AG’s office can’t speculate on any actions from the White House on the Uinta Basin Rail project,” Weiser spokesperson Lawrence Pacheco wrote in a June 10 in email. “Attorney General Weiser is committed to using legal tools available to hold federal agencies accountable for their oversight obligations.”
Weiser, who is term-limited as AG and therefore running for Colorado governor in 2026, has sued or joined litigation in more than 20 cases challenging the Trump administration.
Asked if the risk of wildfire from the project, given the increased intensity of blazes due to climate change and recent cuts to federal funding and staffing to fight wildfires, would be the main focus of briefs before the appellate court, Hunt replied, “absolutely.”
“It was an argument we won on,” he added. “There was no dispute at the Court of Appeals. Nobody disputed that the [STB] wasn’t required under NEPA or under the board’s rail statute to consider the environmental effects of trains traveling downline through Colorado. The board actually did consider in the environmental impact statement the potential risk of wildfires. They just did a perfunctory, arbitrary job. And that’s what the Court of Appeals found.”
Hunt anticipates the appellate court will send the project, which connects the remote but oil-rich Uinta Basin to Union Pacific’s main rail line between Price and Wellington, back to the STB.
“Ultimately, when the project goes back to the Surface Transportation Board and there is an environmental review conducted, wildfires are going to be an essential environmental issue that they’re going have to consider,” Hunt said, adding anticipated derailments and oil spills into remote and hard-to-reach Colorado River canyons will also be a key issue.
“What we pointed to was the board’s own analysis that said the risk of derailment was going to double under the project,” Hunt said. “Now, when you consider the proximity of the Colorado River and you consider the importance of a river that provides water for over 40 million people, our argument was that that demands — which was accepted by the court — in-depth comprehensive analysis of the environmental risk of the project.”
David O. Williams
