Illinois town waits to find out the future of FutureGen

~ Energy Department officials said the agency instead will fund several smaller clean-coal power projects

Companies that want to build the plant insist they're looking for a way to build the plant in Mattoon, Ill.

MATTOON, Ill. -- In the days after a coalition of power and coal companies announced it would build a low-pollution power-plant here, a trip to the grocery or drugstore meant backslapping congratulations for Angela Griffin.

"My kids think it's really neat," said Griffin, the woman who led Mattoon's push to win the FutureGen power plant project. "They think I'm some kind of celebrity."

Now that the U.S. Department of Energy has pulled its support -- and 74-percent share of funding for the plant -- Griffin still gets encouragement from people around town, but not in quite the same way.

A bicyclist pedaled past the water tower and train station Feb. 8 in Mattoon, Ill. (Seth Perlman ~ Associated Press)

"Now it's 'stay strong and keep the faith,'" said Griffin, the president of the Coles County economic development group Coles Together.

Energy Department officials, concerned about skyrocketing costs for the project, said the agency instead will fund several smaller clean-coal power projects around the country. But Illinois' congressional delegation and the FutureGen Alliance -- the companies that want to build the plant -- insist they're looking for a way to build a plant in Mattoon.

For now, there's little people here can do but cling to hope and wait.

"I wait patiently," said Marty Dole, a 53-year-old farmer who owns "a substantial part" of the site southwest of town chosen for the plant. "I don't have any fingernails left, but I wait patiently."

When Mattoon threw its would-be plant site into the competition for FutureGen a few years ago, the town was chasing a dream it hoped would lift the stagnant local economy.

FutureGen, announced with the strong backing of President Bush in 2003, was intended to prove that coal could be burned to generate power while the carbon dioxide released in the process could be captured and stored underground rather than released into the atmosphere.

The project promised 3,000 construction jobs, 150 permanent positions and the possibility that the roughly 240-acre site might lure other related businesses.

Mattoon's population -- 17,340 in 2006, according to the U.S. Census Bureau -- has been in decline for years. About a third of all the jobs in town are in relatively low-paying service and retail industries, and other indicators of economic health such as household income and property values significantly trail the state and the country.

Until the morning of Dec. 18 when FutureGen Alliance chief executive Mike Mudd announced that Mattoon was the developers' choice, it was considered a long shot to get the plant.

Many quietly figured that, if the plant were built anywhere, it would be in Texas. But at least Mattoon might draw the attention of the someone who wanted to build something -- maybe a factory or a privately owned power plant -- on the site southwest of town.

"If nothing else happens, at least Mattoon is in the limelight," Brad Franklin, a 55-year-old salesman from Mattoon, said at a Feb. 5 meeting for locals to meet representatives from the companies that make up the FutureGen Alliance. The meeting, held at an elementary school on a rainy, cold night -- on the same date as the Illinois primary election -- drew several hundred people.

"Mattoon's just been a Sleepy Hollow for a while," Franklin said.

Franklin was also in the audience of more than 200 in the old Time Theater in downtown Mattoon in December when Mudd, speaking via video from Washington, D.C., said, "The Alliance would like to congratulate Mattoon, Illinois ..." Whatever followed was drowned out by the people in the theater, cheering with abandon.

"That's the most excited I've seen the people in Mattoon in my lifetime," Franklin said.

But the process that would lead the Energy Department to pull its support of the project was already well under way.

Both the department and the FutureGen Alliance say they'd been talking about rising costs since spring. The cost of the project, when announced by the agency, was $950 million. That figure is now $1.8 billion. The FutureGen Alliance points out that construction projects around the world have gotten more expensive the past few years with rising costs for building materials.

The divide between the agency and the FutureGen Alliance spilled into the open with an Energy Department letter just days before the announcement warning developers to wait on an announcement.

By the end of January, the agency officially pulled the plug, announcing plans for its new clean-coal project, one that could involve multiple sites but would require starting the process over. That will delay the start of whatever project is built by at least three years.

People in Mattoon say they were genuinely surprised by the Energy Department's decision to abandon FutureGen.

"Everything was well before they made the announcement," said Postal Service clerk Stephanie Young, who was also at the Feb. 5 meeting. Her husband, Rodney, owns a small trucking company that would compete to haul construction equipment and coal if the plant were built.

"Things just started falling apart," she said.

She and a lot of other people agree with what members of Illinois' congressional delegation -- who've vowed to continue pressing to build the plant -- have had to say. The decision had to be based on politics, and influenced by the fact that President Bush is from Texas.

"I think it was based on scientific (information) but then the politics got into it," said Dole, who wouldn't say how much he would make on the land if FutureGen is built.

"I think the government wanted to go to Texas."

The Energy Department denies that politics played any role.

"The restructured approach had everything to do with the project's design (and cost) and nothing to do with the project's location," agency spokeswoman Julie Ruggiero said.

Before the Feb. 5 meeting, Mudd and other members of the FutureGen Alliance board said that, while the project isn't likely to be built without some public funding, they fully intend to try and get the money to build the plant.

That chance that maybe, somehow, the plant might still be built here seems to keep people in Mattoon just optimistic enough to keep the dream alive.

State Sen. Dale Righter, a Mattoon native and a Republican, talked about Mattoon's recent history of economic struggle, which he said his father experienced firsthand.

"In the '80s and '90s, Mattoon lost about eight manufacturing plants," Righter said. "He worked in one of them.

"A lot of people who went through what my dad went through."