Power plant's benefits still unknown

By Alan R.P. Journet

I have been quite disappointed at the way the Cape Girardeau County Commission has been addressing issues regarding the proposed Kinder-Morgan Power Co. power plant. My concerns are many:

I. As yet, there seems to have been no honest evaluation of the potential costs and benefits to the citizens of Cape County regarding the presence of this facility, its economic and environmental costs to local residents and taxpayers and its potential benefits. All we have received are confusions and riddles. Indeed, although proponents have claimed there will be some 20 to 25 employees, the initial application for a Department of Natural Resources permit stated quite clearly that the operational plant would provide but five permanent technical and management jobs and will offer "negligible new growth" to the local economy. If Kinder-Morgan cannot even get this straight, how can we trust anything that they print? Furthermore, the notion that this handful of employees would be locally sought is naive at best. Undoubtedly the company will import them.

II. Given the huge financial debacle of last year, the parallel between Kinder-Morgan and Enron should startle the commission into caution:

1. Kinder-Morgan and Enron are substantially in the same business.

2. The president of Kinder-Morgan is a recent president of Enron. Even though the commission seems to think that Richard Kinder left long before the Enron misdeeds transpired, Forbes magazine as long ago as 1993 was warning: "Overlooked in this euphoria are some big risks Lay is taking as he pushes Enron's profits up so fast. Lay and his protege, Enron Gas Services Group chairman Jeffrey Skilling, have adopted some very aggressive accounting practices." All these questionable practices were under way while Kinder-Morgan's CEO, Richard Kinder, was Enron president.

3. If Kinder-Morgan enters bankruptcy, Cape Girardeau County will be left owning a power plant.

III. The attempts on the part of Kinder-Morgan to scatter a few million dollars here and a few million there just to buy off the school district and the fire department should be a warning. Clearly, this company is calculating very carefully just how much it can throw around in order to save many millions of dollars in taxes that it should be paying. As the Southeast Missourian reports it, Kinder-Morgan plans to short the county some $3 million in taxes.

Rather than rushing to sign on the dotted line to help out the Kinder family, the county commissioners should be looking out for the interests of longtime Cape Girardeau County residents and taxpayers who have been or will be detrimentally impacted by the plant.

IV. The potential environmental problems have simply not been resolved satisfactorily -- in particular, issues pertaining to air pollution, potential land subsidence and heated wastewater releases into state waterways. In short, the county commission should be congratulating and standing alongside the state DNR in demanding that Kinder-Morgan install best available control technology and encouraging an evaluation of wastewater releases.

V. As the Southeast Missourian noted this week, recent secret meetings between Kinder-Morgan officials and commissioners seem questionable at best. They probably contravene the state's Sunshine laws regarding meetings and discussions of public entities. In the case of conflict of interest, which open meetings are supposed to resolve, the appearance of impropriety is sufficient to raise serious doubts about the ethical nature of proceedings. The impression that the good-old-boy network of Cape Girardeau County buddies are getting together to make decisions beneficial to one another at the cost of the rest of the community is certainly fed by the way that this project has been thrust upon the community without any critical evaluation of its merits and with no meaningful public input whatsoever.

VI. Kinder-Morgan brings virtually nothing to the community except maybe a handful of jobs (probably to be filled by employees the company brings to the area). The energy generated would be shipped out of the county and probably out of the state, so it provides no inducement for encouraging construction. Even the short-term construction jobs they promise, if past practice is evidence of future actions, will probably be imported from neighboring areas. Yet the commission seems willing to subsidize this venture to the tune of millions of dollars in tax exemptions.

Given the threats of local costs and the lack of local benefit, it is difficult to imagine why the county commission is so committed to the project. When most businesspeople attempt to open a business, they do so with a significant investment of their own time and resources. It is clear that Kinder-Morgan is attempting to lure Cape Girardeau County into allowing it to get fat without ever investing a dime of its own money. A basic principle of economic exploitation is "other people's money. The county commission seems to have been convinced that a multimillion-dollar company, Kinder-Morgan, deserves more of a break than the average business entrepreneur can obtain.

In a nutshell, even the most positive spin that anyone has so far been able to conjure up for this project ("negligible new growth") leaves many of us wondering why all the excitement. There just seems no justification for the vast subsidy that the county commission is proposing to award Kinder-Morgan to build this facility.

I urge the commission to slow down, undertake some good-faith evaluations of costs and benefits and hold promised public meetings at which the voices of constituents can be heard and answers provided. If commission members, as was claimed at the last meeting, do not have answers to the critical questions, they should cease consideration of the project until they are able to provide answers.

Alan R.P. Journet is the conservation chair of the Trail of Tears Group Ozark Chapter of the Sierra Club.