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“Supported by Funding Opportunity Number CMS-NAVCA190373-01-00 from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, Centers forMedicare & Medicaid Services.The contents provided are solely the responsibility of the authors and

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Marketplace

In fact, Thermosolv did not have any employees of its own when it won the first three grants. The principal investigator was a WRI em-ployee for those contracts.

A third violation of federal rules occurred when Ther-mosolv claimed it would use its own facilities to perform the research, Klaassen’s letter said. Thermosolv did not own any facilities when it completed the first three contracts, and it did not pay rent to WRI for its use of WRI facilities.

WRI’s formal name is the University of Wyoming Research Corporation, but it operates as a sepa-rate organization from the University of Wyoming, said Chad Baldwin, a university spokesperson.

“UW and WRI are sep-arate entities, but attached by name,” Baldwin wrote in an email. “The organization rents space in UW’s Bureau of Mines Building, and UW and WRI collaborate on research projects.”

University employees did not provide any assistance to Thermosolv when it applied for the federal small business grants, Baldwin wrote. He added that UW does not supervise or review grant applications made by WRI.

Although WRI is distinct from the University of Wy-oming, it lists the university as a related organization on public tax records, and the same records say that the university’s board of trustees appoints WRI’s board of directors. WRI employees list university email address-

es on their webpage listing contact information.

Even when the leaders of Thermosolv and WRI were aware that their actions might not be allowed, they continued to skirt and violate the rules, Klaassen’s letter said. After winning the fourth contract, Sethi suggested that WRI spin off Thermosolv as a fully separate company, with its own employees, to follow the contract’s rules.

For the fourth contract, the principal investigator was a Thermosolv employee, and Thermosolv used its own facilities. This change demonstrates that Thermo-solv and WRI were aware of the program’s rules, Klaassen claimed in the letter.

But a WRI employee still completed a majority of the work on Thermosolv’s

fourth contract, in violation of program rules, the letter claimed. Klaassen claimed that the WRI employee was only hired by Thermosolv as a contractor, and that Thermosolv wrongly listed him as their employee.

The four contracts at issue in this investigation are the only four that Thermo-solv has received from the Small Business Innovation Research program. All were worth between $125,000 and $150,000.

The first, awarded in 2015, came from the Department of Energy. It allowed Ther-mosolv to research cost-ef-fective uses of natural gas from low-producing wells, which might otherwise be abandoned or burned off as flares.

The Department of Health and Human Services award-ed Thermosolv’s second

award, also in 2015. Ther-mosolv would perform re-search into creating a more efficient way to fabricate certain small molecules for pharmaceutical compounds.

Thermosolv’s third award came from NASA in 2016. The company was paid to work with researchers from Arizona State University to develop a new structure for some capacitors. This would be particularly valuable in space, according to the funding application.

The company’s fourth, and final, award was granted by the Department of Energy in 2018. Thermosolv sought to research a new, more cost-effective method of car-bon capture, technology that could reduce carbon emis-sions from power generation and limit the environmental damage caused by coal pow-er plants.

WRI/from A1

About 35% of UW courses are expected to be delivered entirely online this fall under the university’s plan to reopen its Laramie campus, the university said earlier this month. This figure more than double the 15% of courses that are delivered online in normal years as part of the school’s distance learning program.

The remainder of UW’s courses this fall—more than 2,000—will have some in-person component,

UW has said. This includes courses that will be run en-tirely in-person, with social distancing, while there are others for which students might be online for some of the sessions. Courses with any in-person component are expected to be charged the traditional fee.

UW has posted a guide to the fee changes for classes that were moved online on the registrar’s website: https://www.uwyo.edu/reg-istrar/delivery-change/pro-gram-distance-delivery-fees.html.

ETHAN STERENFELD/LARAMIE BOOMERANG

The Western Research Institute rents laboratory space in the Bureau of Mines building on the University

of Wyoming’s campus.

Petition/from A1

The city of Laramie’s Planning Commission in June advanced a proposal to amend the city’s regulations for buildings within the downtown district, which includes 25 city blocks, with a mix of stricter and looser measures.

But during a public hearing at council’s July 21 meeting, several people told council members there are a number of items in the proposed ordinance they think would be detrimental to future development and others that don’t serve the interest of making down-town an attractive area.

Chelsea and Rob Hard-er, who own NU2U and NU2U Sports, both in Laramie’s downtown district, sent a letter to the council outlining some of their concerns. While the Harders argued many of the proposed changes would be suitable for the heart of the downtown commercial district, they said the new requirements would apply to a much larger area with properties not suited to comply should they pursue development projects.

In their own situation, the Harders wrote they are planning on develop-ment projects as they battle sinkholes on their property. The new regulations, they wrote, would put the project to save their building and improve their property out of reach.

Rob Harder suggested council-members consider a compromise, such as mak-ing the new code apply to a specific part of the down-town commercial district.

“We’re going to set your-selves up where we’ll pi-geonhole development and nothing is going to happen, I’m afraid,” Rob Harder said during the public hearing. “There’s a lot of good here and I commit myself to helping find a solution, but I don’t think this, as is, is

good for Laramie. I think it’s going to make downtown business owners struggle.”

Another property and business owner, Brett Glass, suggested the ordinance contained so many flaws — in one example, its prohibi-tion of stucco on downtown buildings — that it needed to be voted down and sent back to the Planning Com-mission.

While the council was set to vote on the ordinance during the July 21 meeting, Councilman Bryan Shuster made a motion to postpone the next vote until the Aug. 4 meeting with a work ses-sion scheduled for Tuesday.

“There are a lot of ques-tions downtown owners have,” Shuster said. “This way people who have prop-erties or have questions can ask them at that session.”

City Manager Janine Jordan said staff welcomed the opportunity to have the work session.

“We are aware there’s a lot of incorrect information circulating in the commu-nity, so we think this work session will be a great op-portunity to put the facts on the table,” Jordan said.

Council/from A1 IF YOU GO...What: Laramie City

Council work sessionWhen: 6 p.m. TuesdayWhere: City Hall, 406

Ivinson Ave.How to participate:

Council meetings are available via the city’s Facebook page at www.facebook.com/cityoflaramie. Written public comment can be provided by emailing council@cityoflaramie.org. The public can call in to listen and provide comment during public comment periods by calling 669-900-9128 and entering meeting identification number 853-814-654. Comments are limited to 3 minutes per person.

The Wyoming Mining Association also commend-ed the decision.

“This is something that has been in the works for several years and we’re pleased it has come to this point,” executive director Travis Deti said. “We are hopeful the MOU will streamline the regulatory process for uranium recov-ery, saving time and resourc-es, which will help in getting the industry back on its feet.”

But environmental groups worry about the long-term effects uranium mining can have on scarce groundwa-ter resources throughout the West, especially with the Trump administration declaring it will not pursue heftier regulations around cleanup of in situ mining sites.

They point to ongoing contamination issues at uranium mine sites across the country and the dangers of the hazardous byproduct to drinking water.

“For decades the uranium mining industry has gotten a free pass to pollute, and now the Trump adminis-tration wants to just give up any pretense of protecting scarce water resources across the Mountain West,” Geoff Fettus, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told the Star-Tribune. “EPA has the legal authority — and the duty — to ensure that the uranium industry restores aquifers after it’s done mining. It appears EPA is more focused on protecting a polluting industry than it is on protecting people and our precious water supplies.”

The organization accused the agency of “relinquish-ing” its authority to protect the nation’s aquifers from pollution.

Wyoming is one of the epi-centers of uranium produc-

tion in the U.S. And urani-um mines here use in situ mining, a specific extraction process that recovers the minerals using a chemical solution. The method keeps the orebody in the ground and minimizes surface dis-turbance.

But many conservation ad-vocates also said the process puts precious groundwater sources across the arid West at risk of radioactive con-tamination. Several commu-nity groups fear weakening the rules regulating uranium mining on public lands and sacred sites threatens the natural environment and human health, too.

Meanwhile, public officials in Wyoming and uranium producers vehemently main-tain the strength of the in-dustry’s safety standards and reclamation commitments.

According to Wheel-er, the memorandum of understanding will not shift Wyoming’s role in regulating uranium facilities, a job now led by the state’s Department of Environmental Quality.

“It will not change or require any changes in safeguards that you put into place here in Wyoming for uranium mining,” Wheel-er told the Star-Tribune. “So there shouldn’t be any change at all. The main point of the MOU is (eliminating) the duplication between the EPA’s and the Nuclear Regu-latory Commission’s efforts at the federal level, to make sure that we’re not layering on top of what all the states are already doing.”

The roots of the memo-randum of understanding signed Thursday stretch back several years. The state of Wyoming and federal environmental regulators have long jousted over which agencies should be tasked with regulating the country’s uranium mining activity and how much regulation there should be.

Uranium/from A1