[Vision2020] Jerome, Idaho, coal fired plant

[Debbie Gray]

This is a good article from 'high country news' about
the local organizations that
teamed up against the coal power plant in Jerome in their last
issue. I liked that there were a variety of groups that formed, each with
their own ideas and strengths but each working TOGETHER...

High Country News
--  Vol. 38 No. 8 | May 1, 2006

Magic Valley Uprising
by Ray Ring

How an Idaho citizens´ coalition gunned down a dirty power plant
- and what it means for the West

BOISE, Idaho - In the elegant lobby of Idaho´s capitol, a miner
hefts a jackleg drill, like a medieval knight raising a lance at
an unseen foe. He´s only a statue, molded of metal, but his
spirit inhabits this building. Pro-industry lawmaking has long
been the tradition here, benefiting not only mining, but also
agriculture and nuclear reactors and everything in between.

One morning in late March, Rick Johnson, head of the Idaho
Conservation League, the state´s biggest environmental group,
walks past the statue and up the marble staircases that spiral
toward the domed, heavenly ceiling. In a high gallery
overlooking the Senate chamber, he takes a seat beside three
environmental lobbyists. They´ve come to observe what Johnson
describes as "the biggest environmental vote of the year."

These environmentalists are experts at jumping into the fray.
But on this issue, they have had to work quietly in the
background. Today, they wait, professionally composed but
showing signs of inner tension, as the senators slog through a
pile of routine bills that deal with water disputes and the
Alfalfa and Seed Clover Commission. Finally, the senators get to
the crucial item: House Bill 791.

The bill challenges a multinational corporation´s desire to
build Idaho´s first major coal-fired power plant. Already
approved in the House of Representatives, it would stall the
proposed plant for two years, and might sink it completely. San
Diego-based Sempra Energy has invested millions of dollars in
this power-plant scheme; HB 791 could turn that into a waste of
money.

Sen. Bob Geddes, the stocky Republican who represents Soda
Springs, stands to warn his cohorts that the bill will have "a
chilling effect on business coming to Idaho." Normally, Geddes´
argument against the bill would have traction, because his party
doesn´t like regulations, and it holds nearly 80 percent of the
Legislature´s seats. Indeed, the Republicans´ national leader,
President George W. Bush, champions fossil fuels, including coal
plants.

Democratic Sen. Clint Stennett, who represents ski resort
communities, does the most talking in opposition. "Nothing could
change the face of Idaho as significantly as coal-fired power
plants," Stennett says, rattling off possible impacts such as
pollution, including lethal mercury compounds, along with the
squandering of water and an eroded quality of life.

So far, it all seems utterly predictable. But the debate takes
an unusual turn: Two Republican senators stand to voice their
agreement with Stennett. And when the Senate leader calls for a
vote, and the senators stand, one by one, to announce their
positions, the anti-coal plant bill wins approval by an
overwhelming margin: 30-5.

The environmentalists in the gallery break into low-key grins:
They´ve just witnessed the results of a remarkable grassroots
uprising.

Battles are raging around the West against questionable energy
development, and finally, here in Idaho, the locals have won
one. It´s the latest sign that the region is growing up, defying
the edicts that come out of corporate boardrooms and Washington,
D.C. And it adds to the hope that, even if the West is fated to
be an energy colony for the rest of the nation, at least it will
be on Westerners´ terms.

To Sempra Energy, a company that racked up $11 billion in
revenues on its worldwide operations in 2005, Idaho must have
seemed like the perfect date.

Sempra had found a strategic site for a coal plant, on a butte
in the Magic Valley, a gentle sweep of land along the rim of the
Snake River Canyon, about 120 miles southeast of Boise. The
company had no contract to sell power to Idaho customers, who
already have plenty of electricity from dams, natural gas
plants, a few windmills, and coal plants in every neighboring
state. Instead, Sempra proposed a "merchant plant." Such plants
are strictly profit-making ventures, selling power to any
customers they can reach over interstate transmission lines. The
site was conveniently close to lines that could carry the
plant´s 600 megawatts around the Northwest, and it was also near
a railroad line that could haul in 500 railcars of Wyoming coal
per week.

But it was Idaho´s business-friendly environment, and its scanty
regulations, that made the state most attractive to Sempra. With
current technologies, coal remains the dirtiest method of
generating electricity. Idaho was naive about that. As retired
Republican legislator Laird Noh said in the days before the
vote, "Sempra feels the folks here have fallen off the turnip
truck."

Some states - most notably, California, Oregon and Washington -
have passed laws and created agencies to assert "siting
authority" over proposals for industrial development. It´s
relatively simple for those states to turn down power-plant
proposals, based on concerns about the full range of
socioeconomic and environmental impacts. But Idaho has never
established a statewide siting authority.

The Idaho Public Utilities Commission refused to let the Idaho
Power Company build a coal plant near Boise in the 1970s, but
the PUC has authority only when companies seek Idaho customers.
A merchant plant, selling out of state, would escape the PUC´s
grasp. Sempra would have only needed a few state permits from
other agencies, chiefly for its emissions. And the Legislature
has gone out of its way to keep the regulatory leash loose: It
passed a "stringency law" in 2005, which discouraged Idaho
agencies from getting tougher than federal regulations. Other
industries benefited from the law, but in this case it meant
that a coal plant´s emissions would only have to pass muster
with the federal government - not a great burden under the Bush
administration, which has rolled back a suite of Clean Air Act
regulations (HCN, 5/2/05: The Winds of Change).

Amazingly, the greatest government hurdle for a merchant coal
plant would have been at the local level: the county
commissioners who make land-use decisions. That looked easy,
too.

The Magic Valley has always been friendly to business; it gained
its name from the early white settlers who harnessed the Snake
River´s water and made the desert magically bloom with crops. It
includes portions of eight counties, most of which welcomed
another polluting industry in the 1990s - the giant factory
dairies that relocated here because of the state´s lack of
regulations (HCN, 4/15/02: Raising a Stink). The valley, home to
160,000 people, sent 77 percent of its votes to Bush in the 2004
presidential elections.

Sempra came in confidently, spreading campaign donations to key
politicians, and touting the benefits its plant would bring. The
proposed site is in rural Jerome County, which lost 700 jobs in
1986 when a Tupperware factory shut down. Plant construction
would bring 1,000 high-paying jobs and $25 million in sales tax
revenues, Sempra promised, and long-term operation would create
at least 90 permanent jobs and $18 million per year in local and
state taxes.

The company bought options on farmland around the butte and
7,600 acre-feet of farmers´ water to cool its turbines. The
three Jerome County commissioners seemed agreeable at first:
They let Sempra install an air-quality monitoring station on the
butte to establish a baseline for its emissions permit.

"We were asleep at the switch in not recognizing that large coal-
fired power plants would come (into Idaho)," says Noh, whose
living-room windows look out on the Sempra site. "The public,
and the political structure, were totally unaware of this
possibility. They didn´t have a clue that three county
commissioners could (have the authority to) approve something
like this."

Everything looked good for Sempra. Or so it seemed.

The campaign against the power plant began with Democrats in the
nearby resort towns of Sun Valley and Ketchum in 2005. As usual,
the Idaho Democrats got nowhere on their own.

The campaign didn´t really take off until mid-February this
year, when the Southern Idaho Home and Garden Show opened in the
Magic Valley´s biggest city, Twin Falls. Vendors hawked shiny
new rototillers, fancy windows, and other home-improvement
products in a crowded dirt-floor rodeo stadium. Next to a booth
selling vinyl fences, Carl Nellis, a 66-year-old retiree with a
son on military duty in Afghanistan, ran a display for a
fledgling group called Citizens for Resource Protection.

It was nothing flashy, just a few colored balloons hovering over
a hand-painted sign that said, "Smog Free Idaho," and a picture
of a coal-fired power plant with a red slash across it. "I went
low-tech," Nellis says, "to promote the David versus Goliath
image."

During the three days of the home and garden show, Nellis and a
few other volunteers urged people to sign a petition against the
coal plant. The response far surpassed their expectations: Magic
Valley residents clogged the aisles around the display, and by
the show´s end, more than 2,000 had signed the petition. Within
a few weeks, more than 8,000 people had signed it.

A tour of Twin Falls, nine miles south of the Sempra site,
reveals some of what the company ran into: The small, attractive
city prospers through a blend of the Old West and the New. It
has a big french-fry plant, a sugar-beet plant, the College of
Southern Idaho campus, a new Dell computer service center,
shopping centers and hiking trails. New subdivisions along the
Snake River Canyon´s rims offer breathtaking views.

Out in the countryside, milking machines pump the udders of
300,000 cows; a Scottish cheese company has recently opened
three plants. Springs gush from the canyon walls along the
river, feeding the nation´s biggest collection of trout farms.
Retirees snap up small acreages and homes for $300,000 or more.

There´s still that Western sense of open space and opportunity.
But the locals have learned that their natural resources have
limits. Neighbors have battled each other over water shortages,
for example, and over ammonia and nitrate pollution from some of
the dairy industry´s bad actors.

The prospect of Sempra´s coal plant, with its 650-foot-tall
smokestack and piles of coal and waste ash, was just too much.
No fewer than five grassroots groups sprang up to oppose it.
Their members included local Republican politicians, real estate
agents, dairymen and trout farmers, along with most of the local
doctors, and two former coal-plant managers who had retired to
the valley.

The opponents found plenty of ammo. Sempra, reminiscent of
Enron, had recently agreed to pay hundreds of millions of
dollars to settle charges that it manipulated the energy market
in California. Pollution from its Idaho plant, including a
potpourri of heavy metals, would have drifted across southern
Idaho as far away as Yellowstone National Park. Rainfall could
have washed the pollution into the Eastern Snake River Plain
Aquifer, the water supply for the Magic Valley´s businesses and
homes (HCN, 6/13/05: Idaho gets smart about water). And the
valley already has water problems: Some of its supply is tainted
by naturally occurring arsenic. Children and pregnant women have
been advised not to eat the fish in local reservoirs, because of
mercury pollution believed to drift in from Nevada gold mines
(HCN, 8/8/05: The Great Salt Lake's dirty little secret).

So many people expressed such a range of concerns about the coal
plant that influential Republican legislators began to pay heed.
"I´m not an environmentalist - I´ve fought ´em all my life over
grazing (on federal land)," says Terry Hall, who runs a small
farm and ranch a couple of miles from the Sempra site. "But this
coal plant, I just don´t think we need it. It´s just a money-
hungry (company) coming in here that wants to do it."

Although a few professional environmentalists helped in the
campaign, they kept discreetly in the background. The man who
emerged as the opposition leader, longtime Speaker of the House
Bruce Newcomb, a Magic Valley farmer, wanted it that way.
"Newcomb´s marching orders were, `Do not let the (environmental)
activists own this. You´ve got to mainstream this,´ " says one
insider who asked not to be named.

Rep. Newcomb introduced House Bill 791, and a bipartisan effort
propelled it through the Legislature. Republican Gov. Dirk
Kempthorne signed the bill into law April 7. It imposes a two-
year moratorium on any proposals for conventional coal-fired
power plants in Idaho.

Many residents hope the state will use this two-year time-out to
devise new regulations on coal plants, including a statewide
siting authority. There´s also hope for more emphasis on
renewable energy sources, such as wind power. Another new law,
pushed by the coal-plant´s opponents, requires Idaho to study
energy issues and come up with a comprehensive plan for
developing appropriate new sources of power.

Sempra obviously saw which way the wind was blowing. The day the
Idaho Senate passed the two-year moratorium, the company
abandoned its Magic Valley proposal. Facing opposition to coal
plants in other states, and uncertainty about its ability to
sell coal power, it has decided to concentrate all of its
operations in relatively clean-burning natural gas. The company
says it will try to sell its Magic Valley studies and prep work
to another energy company. But conventional wisdom says that,
although the company invested $20 million here, there will be no
buyers.

Idahoans have rejected the old anti-regulation philosophy, at
least temporarily. But the state has not suddenly become
Ecotopia.

"Sempra is an easy move for Republicans (in the Legislature) who
are anti-regulation," says Rick Foster, a political science
professor at Idaho State University. "They can say, `We´re not
really trying to regulate business, except where it´s really an
egregious issue.´ "

No doubt, Idaho´s Republican Party has selfish motives. Gov.
Kempthorne has recently been nominated to be Bush´s new Interior
secretary, and there´s a credible Democratic candidate to
replace him: Jerry Brady, whose family runs the Idaho Falls Post-
Register. Brady won 42 percent of the vote when he ran for the
governorship in 2002. This time around, Brady quickly made the
merchant coal plant his issue, speaking out against it in Magic
Valley venues such as Rotary Club.

The power-plant fight "sparked a tremendous amount of interest
in Brady´s campaign, even among Republican (voters)," Laird Noh
says. "Any candidate running on the Republican ticket, statewide
or in local races, would really like to get this (coal plant)
issue off the table" before the November elections.

But even selfish motives can lead to progress. And there is
convincing evidence that Idaho is going through a fundamental
shift. More than 90 percent of Idahoans wanted their governor
and Legislature to "deal with energy policy issues in the next
year," according to a statewide poll conducted in December by
Jim Weatherby, director of Boise State University´s Public
Policy Center. Sixty-two percent want to take power-plant siting
out of the hands of county governments. Idahoans have clear
ideas about the most desirable sources of power. The top five,
in order, are wind, solar, hydro dams, geothermal, and biomass.
Coal-fired power plants rank at the bottom of the list. Sixty-
two percent of Idahoans are willing to pay higher electricity
rates to encourage development of renewable power generation.

The Magic Valley uprising combines many positive political
trends in the West, which surface even amid the disasters of the
oil and gas fields and suburban sprawl. More nontraditional
allies are tackling issues ranging from sage grouse preservation
to mass transit. As Democrats and Republicans become more
competitive, many old ideologies are slowly surrendering to
pragmatism. In Idaho, as elsewhere, the locals are trying to
work things out.

In Colorado last month, real estate agents, homebuilders,
developers and environmentalists shared the lead in trying to
help landowners deal with oil and gas drillers; they nearly
pushed a "split estate" law through the Colorado Legislature,
and soon they´ll be knocking on that door again. In Arizona,
bankers, developers and environmentalists are pushing a ballot
initiative that would preserve 700,000 acres of state land as
open space. And even off-road vehicle riders have raised their
voices to protest plans by the Bush administration and Congress
to sell off parcels of federal land (HCN, 3/6/06: Public Acres
for Sale). "They like the idea of public land, where it´s owned
by the American people," not by private owners who would close
off recreation access, says Brian Hawthorne, public-lands
director of the BlueRibbon Coalition.

"We are seeing that kind of maturing in many quarters in the
West," says Daniel Kemmis, senior fellow at the Center for the
Rocky Mountain West in Missoula, Mont. "We should expect a more
sophisticated approach to these natural resource issues, as more
communities come to understand how strongly their economic
prosperity depends on quality-of-life factors."

Blame it on NIMBY, if you wish, the old attitude of "not in my
backyard." Kemmis prefers "enlightened self-interest," a term
used by French historian Alexis de Tocqueville when he studied
the fledgling American democracy 170 years ago. "I doubt in most
cases that it´s a matter of people saying, `Oh, I´m tired of
fighting other people, let´s see if we can get along,´ " Kemmis
says. "There is some of that, but I think, in most cases, it´s a
lot more hard-headed calculation."

Much of the West, like the Magic Valley, is now staked out by a
variety of well-established local interests. And no matter how
fiercely the locals might argue among themselves, when faced
with a common threat they can mount a vigorous defense.

Lee Halper, a Magic Valley activist who fights dairy pollution,
says, "For 20 years, I´ve been trying to get people to recognize
that this state has limits. Some days, I have to bounce my head
off the wall, to keep from choking people." The victory over the
coal plant, however temporary it might prove, "has raised the
awareness of a lot of people," he says.

"Hopefully, they´re going to stay together enough to say, `This
is just one issue we´re going to have to face, if we´re going to
live in Idaho with clean air and clean water.´ And a lot of them
are stating that. I look to the future ..."

The author, HCN´s Northern Rockies editor, writes from Bozeman,
Montana.

© copyright 2002- 2006 High Country News
High Country News* Box 1090 * Paonia, CO 81428 * 1-800-905-1155

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Article Code: 16262  Location: Energy / Coal
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Debbie Gray             dgray at uidaho.edu
Research Analyst                208-885-4017
University of Idaho     208-885-5759 (fax)
Dept of Ag Econ and Rural Sociology
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