"At the moment there are no answers because there is no project." -- Richard Sedano, Commissioner of Public Service Department

GAS-FIRED OPPOSITION

If The Pipeline Comes

One family could lose its spring water, joins opposition

September 4, 1999

David Gram
Associated Press Writer

TINMOUTH -- Faye Hepburn would replace the worn asbestos siding on her modest house. Her husband Sam's not sure what he'd do with the money, but says simply, "We could use it."

The Hepburns never grew rich when Sam was working construction -- he's 73 and retired now -- but just recently it seemed they had a chance, if not at riches, then genuine comfort.

Vermont Pure, the booming bottled water company from Randolph, wanted to tap into an exceptionally productive spring on the Hepburns' land: 350 gallons a minute at two-tenths of a cent per gallon would work out to more than $360,000 a year.

But then came the proposed gas pipeline, mapped out along a route that runs through ledge just above the Hepburns' spring. The deal with Vermont Pure is on hold, and could be dead if blasting for the trench damages the spring.

Count the Hepburns among a growing number of residents in the Green Mountain towns between Rutland and Bennington who have risen up to oppose what would be the biggest energy project in Vermont's history, in electrical output nearly three times the size of the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant.

A fledgling Vermont partnership of two men -- Robert Votaw and former state Sen. Thomas Macaulay R-Rutland -- has been trying to line up several hundred million dollars in financing to pipe natural gas into Vermont's southwest corner to fuel a gas-fired 270-megawatt power station in Bennington in the industrial site off North Branch Street Extension and a 1,080 megawatt plant in Rutland.

The pipeline -- 63 miles from the New York line through Bennington to Rutland -- would be built by a subsidiary of Energy East, the holding company that also owns the New York State Gas & Electric utility. The power plants would be built by Vermont Energy Park Holdings, owned by Votaw and Macaulay and their financial backers.

The opponents' ranks include subsistence farmers like Annette Smith of Danby, founder of a new group called Vermonters for a Clean Environment, which has already launched a web site and hired outside experts to question the power plants' air quality, noise and visual impacts. The opponents include native Vermonters, relative newcomers and part-time residents, including nationally known television producer and political activist Norman Lear, who has a vacation home near the pipeline route in Shaftsbury.

Gov. Howard Dean has said the project could bring the sort of infrastructure -- two new power plants and a source of cheap, clean-burning natural gas for industry -- needed to boost economic growth in a part of the state that needs it.

Development advocates in southwestern Vermont have complained for years that they are hampered by a lack of interstate highways -- and a lack of support from Montpelier. Earlier this year Dean told them that if they're serious about development, it's time to "put up or shut up," and get in line behind the pipeline and power plants.
But so far, newspaper letter columns have been a forum mainly for opponents. "It seems to me the only discussion about it is negative," said David O'Brien of the Rutland Economic Development Corp. "If you want to see some level of job growth, we have to look at infrastructure growth that can foster that."

Dean's Public Service commissioner, Richard Sedano, says any effort to sell the project to Vermonters has been hampered so far by a lack of answers from the developers.

"At the moment there are no answers because there is no project," Sedano said.

There's no project, but there is a plan.

Tom Macaulay's Jeep wagon rolls and bumps along a dirt road on the outskirts of Rutland into a broad, hilly meadow surrounded by industry and older residential areas to the north, U.S. Route 7's sprawl to the east, and the newer U.S. Route 4 to the south, which snakes away toward New York state.

Macaulay points to a lower part of the property and says the bulk of the four football-field-sized buildings would be built there ot make the view of them less obtrusive. More difficult to hide would be four stacks that Macaulay estimates would rise 160 feet or so in the air

[ "Gas pipeline still a pipedream without full funding"

Macaulay says Rutland is an excellent location for the four generating units because it is traversed by a big and currently under-used power line that connects the Vermont Yankee plant in the state's southeast corner with the Vermont Electric Power Co.'s dispatch center just north of Rutland.

Natural gas is the fuel of choice for the new generators because it is priced competitively with oil and coal and burns much more cleanly, Macaulay and Sedano said.

Macaulay says plans call for local distribution networks to be built off the main line to provide an until-now unavailable source of energy to southwestern Vermont's homes and businesses.

The idea of bringing gas to the Rutland region is popular tat the Killington Ski Area. American Skiing Co. Vice President Carl Spangler says the resort may be able to use gas to fuel snowmaking compressors in place of diesel. That would help Killington face new, tougher air quality regulations set to take effect in 2006.

The Bennington Chamber of Commerce and the Bennington County Industrial Corp. both back the idea, seeing a boon to local development.

But Macaulay says the pipeline depends on the power plants to take the gas. "Without the size of the power plants, the economics of the pipeline don't make sense. You need the anchor tenants to get the natural gas here."

But the first question Macaulay faces is whether his project will get financing. "We've got all the dominoes lined up. We've just got to push the first one."

That's the first question, but far from the only one. The questions fall into two broad categories: economic and environmental.

On the economic front, there are roughly 60 gas-fired power plants proposed for construction around New England in the coming years, and nowhere near the need for all of them. New England's current power consumption peaks at around 21,000 megawatts; if all the proposed plants were built, it would add some 30,000 megawatts of supply. Sedano estimates that only a quarter of the proposed plants will ever become reality.

Opponents of the Vermont project also question the idea of bringing gas in from out of state to make electricity, most of which would be sold out of state. Macaulay responds: "We are basically a manufacturer. We should be treated like any other manufacturer in the state of Vermont." He cited General Electric in Rutland, which makes airplane components sold around the world.

Then there are the developers' plans to tie the Rutland power plant into the high-voltage line connecting Vermont Yankee and West Rutland.

That proposal could compete with one by the line's owners to use it to ship more power from Canada to southern New England. Sedano said that because of the complicated mechanics of the power transmission grid, trying to accommodate both proposals could lead to a burst of power line upgrades and construction around Vermont.

But it's the environmental questions that are asked most heatedly by project opponents. Smith's group commissioned a consultant's report that said noise from the Rutland plant would be audible for up to 25 miles away (this was doubted by a New York state environmental official who has followed the gas industry there); plumes of steam would rise up to 500 feet into the sky; the steam would return to the ground as ice in winter, making nearby roads dangerous; even relatively clean-burning natural gas would degrade air quality to some extent.

The opponents are organized and ready to fight -- even before the project has obtained financing or filed a formal application before the Public Service Board. John Tytell, a professor of English at Queens College of the City University of New York and a highly regarded writer on the Beat poets, scoffs at project backers' claims that ripping up his backyard ot lay a new pipeline would be all for the "public good."

"They really mean for the good of the pockets of people like Macaulay and the investors," he says.

As for Gov. Dean, Tytell scoffs again. He shows a visitor a line mapped out by surveyors, well within 150 feet of his circa-1760 farmhouse in Danby. Then he shows a letter from the governor, talking about the need to accommodate infrastructure development to encourage economic growth. Handwritten on the bottom is this:

"P.S. We will not allow a pipeline to be put in 150 feet from any house."