Jun 28 - McClatchy-Tribune Regional News - Timothy B. Wheeler The Baltimore Sun



A New York company's proposal to bring 200 badly needed "green jobs" to Baltimore by building a "renewable-energy" plant in the Fairfield area is drawing heat from -- of all people -- environmentalists.

That's because the 120-megawatt power plant planned by Energy Answers International of Albany would burn shredded municipal waste, tire chips, auto parts and demolition debris for fuel. Company officials argue the nearly $1 billion project will generate electricity and steam from waste that otherwise would fill up landfills. And it would be one of the cleanest facilities of its type in the nation, they say, with state-of-the-art pollution controls.

But activists argue the facility is still a glorified trash incinerator that would discourage recycling and spew hazardous pollutants into the nearby Brooklyn and Curtis Bay neighborhoods, which are already afflicted with some of the least healthy air in the state because of all the industry in the area. At least one environmental group has threatened to sue if the project gets a green light.

"Is this what Curtis Bay is going to be known for?" Dr. Gwen DuBois, a member of the Chesapeake Physicians for Social Responsibility, asked at a public hearing on the project in late May. "We want good union jobs, but this is not green."

 The project, to be financed in part by up to $300 million in federal stimulus funds, has won the backing of union leaders eager for the hundreds of jobs the company says the facility will create. It's also been endorsed by usually industry-wary community groups, wooed by the developer's promise of scholarships and up to $100,000 a year for improvements in neighborhoods long suffering from neglect and joblessness.

The proposed plant is being reviewed by the state Public Service Commission, which must approve any facility that would generate power to the electric grid. The commission has held a pair of hearings on the project and plans another one June 28 to review the facility's air-quality impacts.

"This is a very positive economic and environmental project," Patrick Mahoney, Energy Answers president, said at the hearing in Curtis Bay. He argued it would keep thousands of tons of waste out of landfills, reduce climate-warming greenhouse gases, help the state generate more of its power from renewable sources and produce environmentally friendly jobs.

The facility would also help recycle a shuttered factory, occupying a portion of the 90-acre waterfront site where FMC Corp. once manufactured ingredients for pesticides. That plant closed in 2008, and FMC has been working to clean up and contain toxic chemicals left behind in the soil and ground water.

Mahoney said the plant would employ up to 200 workers, and its construction would create work for 500 to 700 people. The company has pledged to recruit locally and to hire union labor.

"How can you argue that? This area needs jobs," said Michael Herd of the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, Local 193.

Carol Eshelman, executive director of the Brooklyn and Curtis Bay Coalition, said community leaders negotiated an agreement with Energy Answers that aims to spare residents some of the noise, dust and pollution from hundreds of trucks expected to haul in the processed refuse that the plant would be burning. The company pledged to route the truck traffic around their neighborhoods, she said.

It also has offered scholarships and $50,000 to $100,000 a year in donations for community improvements. The area has a park that lacks a single picnic table, Eshelman noted.

"We're going to have industry no matter what as our neighbors," she said, observing that the community has been living next to factories, fuel depots, coal piers and other industrial facilities for more than a century. "We want to do this in a right way."

Environmentalists argue, however, that the plant would be a detriment to the community, despite its economic attraction.

"Government and regulatory entities have been sold the idea that the modern trash incinerator is really a power plant," Andrew Galli, Maryland director for Clean Water Action, said at the hearing. The amount of energy produced by "waste to energy" facilities is much less than what could be saved by recycling, he argued -- yet communities would be dissuaded from recycling because they would have to supply a certain volume of refuse to the plant.

Lawyers for the Environmental Integrity Project, a Washington-based group representing other environmental organizations, noted that government records show industrial facilities in the area released more than 20 million pounds of hazardous air pollutants in 2008, and more than a third of all the particulates emitted in the entire state -- dust and soot produced by combustion that can cause breathing and heart problems. The Brooklyn, Curtis Bay and Hawkins Point neighborhoods have one of the highest death rates for chronic lower respiratory disease in the city, the groups say.

The proposed plant could release as much as 240 pounds of mercury a year, opponents argue, which would make it one of the state's leading emitters of a toxic metal that can cause neurological damage, especially in young children. There are two schools within a mile of the proposed plant's fenceline, they note. And with 400 to 600 truck trips to and from the plant projected daily, they say, the amount of harmful particulate pollution from diesel exhaust and road dust would be significantly worsened.

Kimberly Wilson, a lawyer with the Environmental Integrity Project, said at the May hearing that activists worry the state would not impose stringent enough limits on what the plant could burn or emit into the air. She warned that the state's process for approving such power plants was not in line with the federal Clean Air Act, and thus could be subject to legal challenge if the project went ahead.

The Maryland Department of the Environment has given the project a mixed blessing, saying it could be built there but only with some of the tightest controls on toxic mercury emissions in the country. The agency also has demanded the project get a refuse-disposal permit, which company officials say could kill it by delaying construction long enough to lose the federal funds needed to build it.

Mahoney, the company's president, dismissed comparisons of his proposed power plant with incinerators, even with waste-to-energy burners like the RESCO plant operated by Wheelabrator Technologies Inc. on the Middle Branch in South Baltimore.

Mahoney said his plant would generate energy far more efficiently and produce much less pollution than an incinerator, meeting stringent new emission limits. He said the company has contacted local officials throughout the Baltimore area seeking contracts to take waste they're not recycling but already burning or hauling to landfills.

The refuse would be screened to recover metals and shredded to burn more completely, he explained. The trash to be burned would be processed at some as-yet undetermined location away from the plant and trucked in.

That's an important distinction, according to Mahoney, because he's arguing that the plant shouldn't be subject to the same regulations and red tape as other waste-disposal facilities. He complained that the project is in jeopardy because MDE recently reversed itself and insisted he apply for a refuse-disposal permit.

MDE spokeswoman Dawn Stoltzfus acknowledged the agency had told the company last year it would not need a refuse-disposal permit. But she said agency officials changed their mind after reviewing the project more closely.

"They're burning processed municipal solid waste," she said. "Therefore they need a refuse-disposal permit." She said the RESCO plant in Baltimore and the state's other two waste-to-energy facilities in Harford and Montgomery counties had to go through the same process.

But such permits can take up to a year to get, Mahoney said. If "substantial" construction doesn't get under way by the end of the year, he said, the project would no longer qualify for a federal stimulus grant, which would jeopardize financing for it.

The public service commission has final say over whether to approve the project and under what conditions.

The next hearing is at 7 tonight at Curtis Bay Recreation Center, 1630 Filbert St.

Tim.wheeler@baltsun.com

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