Borough reopens power plant debate

PALMER — The Mat-Su Borough Assembly is making moves toward changes to, if not outright repeal of, a power plant ordinance put in place in 2007.

On Tuesday, the assembly voted to put together a working group to study the power plant ordinance.

“I’d just like to have a group of people identify what our energy policy is and do we need to modify it and have that engaging discussion,” said Assemblyman Steve Colligan, who sponsored the ordinance.

Colligan’s ordinance eventually passed unanimously, but Assemblyman Warren Keogh has since made a motion to reconsider, which the assembly will take up in February. Keogh said he wants some time to figure out who all has been communicating with borough officials about power plants and what they’ve been saying. A letter he attached to his motion to reconsider from Matanuska Electric Association General Manager Joe Griffith discusses the issues surrounding the power plant ordinance.

The ordinance applies to any plant putting out more than 50 megwatts. It establishes a permitting process that any company wanting to build such a plant has to undergo.

When the ordinance was established, MEA was seeking to build two power plants in the Valley, one fired by coal the other by natural gas. The ordinance was by most accounts a reaction to the coal plant.

MEA eventually ditched the plan to build a coal-fired plant and, for the natural gas plant, decided to build in Eklutna just outside the borough’s boundaries. The cooperative has said and continues to maintain that was a decision based on avoiding those permit requirements.

Colligan said the decision on the borough’s part has had unintended consequences.

For instance, a recent squabble over power lines possibly running through Wasilla. Colligan said that if MEA could have built its plant in the Knik-Goose Bay Road area where the bulk of the borough’s population growth is happening, it wouldn’t have to build large transmission lines to get power there.

Keogh brought up the possibility that some of his colleagues might have conflicts of interest. Mayor Larry DeVilbiss, he said, sits on the board of directors for MEA. Assemblyman Ron Arvin is a board member at the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, which oversees the Alaska Energy Authority, which is the agency that will likely be in charge of building a hydroelectric dam on the Susitna River, if such a dam is ever built.

Arvin said his unpaid position as a board member at AIDEA is tangential at best to the legislation at hand. And, he pointed out, an outside attorney provided the borough an opinion on the conflict and found Arvin is in the clear.

“It might be convenient to be an individual that doesn’t have any other activities going on in their life, but when one is involved in a number of things, as some of us are, I want to make sure that I am doing what is correct and according to code,” Arvin said.

The outside attorney also cleared DeVilbiss.

Assemblyman Jim Colver brought up the Susitna dam in requesting that one member of the energy policy board come from the Mat-Su Borough’s Fish and Wildlife Commission.

“That’s going to require local permits if it would be permitted under this law that we have,” he said of the dam. “There’s going to be access roads. There’s going to be surface impacts that are much bigger than the dam itself.”

Colligan, though, said he wants the commission not to be “project specific,” but instead to come up with a decent borough energy policy rather than one that, in his opinion, was directed at one project — the coal plant.

Going project-by-project, “you’re going to jump down too many rabbit holes,” he said.

Eventually, the borough assembly decided to expand the number of seats on the board from five to seven. There will be one member from MEA, one from the natural gas distribution company Enstar, one from the Fish and Wildlife Commission, one with an engineering or technical background and one from the renewable energy community. There would also be two at-large seats.

Contact reporter Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.