From Delta Center to EnergySolutions Arena, with Love

By Tracy Medley, 11-21-06

Not wanting to be associated with those losers over at Delta, the Jazz have chosen to align themselves with…a nuclear waste dump? No, really. Yesterday, literally dozens of EnergySolutions and Jazz employees cheered the decision to change the name of the Delta Center to the EnergySolutions Arena. But, according to reports in both The Salt Lake Tribune and Deseret Morning News, though most Jazz fans don’t mind the change, Salt Lake City residents find the idea of connecting our city’s basketball team to hazardous waste management less than awesome. And associations aside, "EnergySolutions Arena" doesn't exatly roll off the tongue.

Trading the arena’s moniker might have seemed like a good plan on paper, what with the beleaguered Delta Airlines facing hostile takeover and all. I mean, no sports fan wants to associate “hostile takeovers” with their basketball team. But what about corporate fraud or in basketball speak, the flagrant foul? Yes, despite efforts to clean up their image, EnergySolutions, formerly Envirocare, has its own checkered past in Utah.

Some of Envirocare’s former “sins,” as reported by Judy Fahys of The Tribune were: conspiring with Radiation Bureau director Larry Anderson (who received gifts, both cash and condo worth more than $600,000 from then Envirocare CEO, Khosrow Semnani) to convert school trust-lands into a radioactive waste dump in the 1980’s; belligerently suing local environmental groups; and using their financial might to squelch initiatives that would raise taxes on radioactive waste. To be clear, all of this took place under Semnani’s watch, but Envirocare/EnergySolutions’ new chief, Steve Creamer, doesn’t exactly come to Utah with a clean slate. In1989 he sold the state an experimental concrete overlay called Syn-crete, which failed to hold up even through the course of construction on Interstate 15, a booboo that cost Utah taxpayers an estimated $3 million to fix.

Despite the controversy Larry H. Miller is standing by his decision to dump Delta for EnergySolutions. Telling The Tribune, with Tom Cruise-ian certainty that he knows best, “The first thing I'd say to anyone who is uneasy or would make a controversy out of it is, 'Find out what you're talking about.' . . . It's a safe business and a necessary business based on alternatives going forward."

Oh yes, right it’s just that we don’t know the history of hazardous waste and Miller does. Gosh, I feel so glib.

All joking aside, it should tell us something that the beacon of wealth in our community’s economy has shifted from air travel to a radioactive waste dump.
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