Around Utah

Corporate Service Project on School Trust Lands

San Juan County - Employees from WILLIAMS NORTHWEST PIPELINE and the SCHOOL AND INSTITUTIONAL TRUST LANDS ADMINISTRATION (SITLA) joined forces to cleanup approximately 60 tons of junk and debris near Blue Hill in San Juan County just outside of Moab. The cleanup was on approximately 40 acres.

Williams Northwest Pipeline is an energy infrastructure company that manages thousands of miles of pipeline across the United States and delivers approximately 14 percent of the nation’s daily supply of natural gas.

“When I got the call that employees of Williams Northwest Pipeline wanted to do a service project of cleaning up some areas on trust lands that have been abused by local residents illegally dumping and shooting up the debris with their guns, I was really excited,” says Moab’s trust lands resource specialist, Bryan Torgerson. “It’s not every day that you get people wanting to pick up trash.”

Williams Northwest Pipeline employee Ryan Ellis explains, “We were looking for a local service project; many of us are avid shooters ourselves and we were tired of what was happening to the lands out here and the bad rap shooters are getting from this. We hope people will see what we’ve accomplished and be more responsible. Hopefully we can keep these lands open to the public.”

The School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration is an independent state agency that manages 3.4 million acres of Utah trust lands for the financial benefit of Utah’s public schools and 11 other public institutions. Money generated from school trust lands is deposited in the state permanent school fund, a perpetual endowment that annually distributes income to each K-12 public school in Utah.