The draft Environmental Impact Statement concerning the proposed Gateway West Transmission project has garnered some concerns about a familiar topic, sage grouse.
The 11-hundred mile transmission line project for Idaho Power and Rocky Mountain Power would travel from Glenrock across southern Wyoming into Idaho.
Project Manager Walt George says they received a number of concerns about how the line would impact private property and whether it might impact some historic areas of the state. But George says sage grouse concerns were very prominent in the public comments, which is a worry since the bird is close to being recommended for federal protections.
“We are committed to completely analyzing the impacts to Sage Grouse and providing a set of mitigation measures to minimize those impacts. But the devil is in the detail and actually mitigation was one of the largest groups of comments we got and many of those were about Sage Grouse. People just aren’t satisfied that what is being proposed is sufficient.”
George says the final E-I-S is slated for release by October of 2012.
