Many people saw Tooele County’s fight against Rocky Mountain Power as quixotic from the beginning. After all, nobody could remember a time when the mega-utility, which is ultimately owned by billionaire Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, was defied by a local government and lost. In other places, RMP has simply steamrolled over such opposition, all the while claiming that it is serving a public good so great that it transcends the minor concerns of any one community.

Given that context, it’s easy to see why many people saw last week’s decision by the Utah Utility Facility Review Board as inevitable. The five-member board unanimously decreed that Tooele County must issue a conditional use permit to allow RMP to build its power line project across the southeast bench of the Oquirrh Mountains. In rendering the decision, the board said it was confined by state statute to a very narrow examination of the project based strictly on safety, reliability, adequacy and efficiency.

That leads us to ask a simple question: When an entire community is against a public utility project, who does consider their concerns?

The two-year process of siting this transmission line has been disillusioning for ordinary citizens on several levels. RMP held meetings to solicit public comments, the Bureau of Land Management did likewise, written comments poured into the project website, and public meetings were held before city councils, the Tooele County Planning Commission, the Tooele County Commission and the facility review board. The overwhelming majority of these comments opposed the route. In fact, with the notable exception of the Tooele County Chamber of Commerce, of which RMP is a member, virtually every major government or civic group in the county came out in opposition. We editorialized against the route last October and again in March of this year.

Yet all of those very valid reasons for not sticking to the proposed route seem to have amounted to naught.

We agree with Tooele County Attorney Doug Hogan’s opinion that the board defined its legislative mandate too narrowly. In fact, we suspect that RMP’s legions of legal advisors actually “helped” the board define that mandate in a way that basically absolved it of having to consider the big picture. Did the Legislature ever honestly intend for criteria such as “efficiency” — a term that seems to inherently favor the company —to carry greater weight than the desecration of an iconic mountainside? And what of the very real safety concerns, which were only acknowledged by the board in an indemnifying sort of way en route to giving RMP exactly what it wanted?

If indeed the board carried out its duties to the letter of the law, as it claims, we can only conclude that the state needs a new mechanism for weighing the thoughtful objections of an entire local community against the desires of a public utility.