Manchester Journal
August 20, 1999

FORUM

The Governor’s gas pipeline

To the editor:

It is not easy to fathom the Dean administration’s policy toward environmental matters – possibly because it doesn’t have one.

Consider this: the state attorney general and its Agency of Natural Resources are suing the United States Environmental Protection Agency, claiming that the federal government has failed to protect Vermont from air pollution from other states. The director of the state’s Air Pollution Control Division says that power plants in several Midwestern states release nitrogen oxide and other pollutants that drift to Vermont and pollute our air and soil.

Yet at the same time the administration – led by the governor – is making every effort to attract two enormous gas-burning, electricity-generating plants to this state. The ultimate irony is that those two huge plants will spew out exhaust fumes bearing the same nitrogen oxide we are now getting from the Midwest (the source of our acid rain), plus carbon dioxide (that contributes to global warming), plus quantities of toxic waste.

Vermont is suing the federal government for failing to prevent what the governor of Vermont wants to do. Got that?

Each of those two plants will sit in a natural basin that tends to hold heat and smog and has poor air circulation. The smaller factory is to be a 270 megawatt generating plant in Bennington (evidently located near Mount Anthony High School). The larger one is a 1,080 megawatt monster in Rutland – one of the biggest such producers in the United States.

Let’s look at the larger, Rutland factory. It will sit on a 60-acre site. Whether it is one or several buildings, the plant itself is expected to cover 30 acres. That is 2 1/2 times the area of Yankee Stadium. It is more than 15 times as large as the footprint of the Empire State Building.

It will have several 70-foot cooling towers and one smokestack that will probably be more than 200 feet tall, spewing exhaust fumes across Rutland, Woodstock, Bellows Falls, over into Hanover and much of central New Hampshire.

It will require somewhere between 4 million and 6.5 million gallons of water a day for cooling.

It will be a permanent blight on the landscape, visible to anyone entering Rutland from any direction, and since it will operate 24 hours a day, year-round, there will be no letup in the exhaust fumes it generates.

The Bennington plant will have the same characteristics, only on a somewhat smaller scale.

Gov. Dean doesn’t seem to realize that what brings new residents and tourists to Vermont is the magnificent landscape God gave it, plus its largely rural character and its healthy environment. And what has maintained that landscape, keeping it open for the past two centuries and more, are Vermont’s farmers and the livestock that thrive on grassland. Those farmers – not the developers of gas plants and pipelines – are the people who need and deserve the state’s support. They are the ones in dire need, and without them this state will quickly resemble the blighted area that stretches uninterrupted from Boston to Washington, D.C. and on down the east coast.

Unfortunately, the governor’s vision seems to be an industrialized, highly developed Vermont, a Vermont of ticky-tacky tract housing and big box superstores, of which Williston is a tragic example. Remember – what you see in Williston today was prime farmland a dozen or so years ago.

Equally unfortunately, the governor doesn’t seem to understand why people oppose the proposed gas pipeline and generating plants. To businessmen in Bennington who have grave and legitimate doubts about the advisability of this project, the governor had a curt, callous answer: “Put up or shut up!”

Gov. Dean treats those of us who are concerned about the safety of this project like a bunch of spoiled cry-babies standing in the path of progress. But why shouldn’t we worry when representatives of the corporations that are behind the pipeline and the plants refuse to provide any specifics whatever about their plans? After all, if you own a house on a quarter-acre of land in East Dorset or Arlington or Danby and you are ordered to grant a 100-foot right of way to the pipeline company, believe me, it’s cause for concern. What’s left of your yard? What if the pipe leaks? What if there’s an explosion? What if they don’t clean up the mess after they’ve dug the trench? What happens when they sell rights in the trench to a telephone or television company? How many companies get to dig up your front yard and monitor their underground lines? And what effect does all this have on the value of your property?

Obviously Montpelier considers this a done deal. Agency of Natural Resources (ANR) spokesmen speak of it as a fait accompli, telling us what they will do when, not if, it happens. Don’t worry, they say, they’ll figure out ways for the 24-inch pipeline to go under streams, through wetlands – maybe even under Emerald Lake and through the rock formations alongside it, under stone walls, through stands of old-growth timber – you name it.

The pipeline alone is a project of such magnitude that State Auditor Edward Flanagan quite properly raised the question of how it will be reviewed. The ANR replies that it will require at least two years for a team of newly hired engineers to inspect the 63-mile route of the pipeline and it will cost $800,000 to $1 million – or more. Further, the ANR states, “this large project” will be reviewed “on an extremely accelerated time frame.”

Do we want what may be the most important threat to Vermont we will see in our lifetimes to be rammed through after “an expedited review” just because the governor and some giant corporations want it?

Why on earth should Vermont provide a right-of-way through people’s yards and farms, through environmentally fragile areas, allowing the utilities to blast and gouge a 6-foot by 6-foot trench through our villages – just to fatten some executives’ wallets? Why should we permit our air to be fouled and our citizens’ health to be endangered for the sake of huge New York and Canadian utilities that seek to use Vermont for their own gain?

You see, Gov. Dean, you may be all for the project but a great many of us taxpayers and voters are not. On the basis of what we are told by the promoters – the representatives of New York State Electric & Gas (NYSEG), Iroquois Gas Transmission Systems, and Vermont Energy Park Holdings, who are the only people likely to benefit from it – their purpose is to construct two enormous gas-fired plants that will make electricity that will be fed into the grid. Virtually all of it will be sold out of state. Vermont, in other words, benefits not at all.

“It’s better to export than to import,” they tell us. So Vermont must suffer so that these mammoth corporations can make more money.

Let me suggest a medical analogy here, if I may. You’re a doctor, Gov. Dean. Suppose a salesman comes to your office and tells you he has a pill that’s a sure-fire cure for cancer. It’s produced by a company you never heard of, it hasn’t been tested, he can’t give you any specifics about it, and it may have unpleasant or even dangerous side-effects, but he wants you to prescribe it for your patients entirely on his say so. Would you recommend it? Or would you show him the door?

People in your state are deeply troubled, Governor, and they have a right to expect more respect and understanding from their chief elected official than “Put up or shut up!”

Richard M. Ketchum
Dorset