MEA petition raises questions

MAT-SU — A petition Matanuska Electric Association is circulating asking the Borough’s power plant ordinance be put to a vote has caught the eye of a local utility watchdog group.

In a written statement, the MEA Ratepayers Alliance raises concerns that signature gatherers may be misleading Valley voters.

Tim Leach, president of the alliance’s board of directors, said he ran into a petition taker two weekends ago on a shopping trip. The man asked if Leach would sign a petition to help build MEA’s 100-megawatt natural gas-fired plant in the Valley. Leach said the thrust of the petition is actually to repeal the Borough’s ordinance governing power plants.

“And so the initial pitch that this fellow was making saying, ‘Hey, sign this petition if you want a gas power plant,’ seemed a little misleading to me,” Leach said.

MEA spokeswoman Lorali Carter said after Leach brought his concerns to the utility’s board of directors meeting Monday, she called the signature gatherer and went over his pitch.

The petition taker, a Valley resident, earns $1 per signature, the maximum allowed under state law, Carter said.

Carter said she gave the signature gatherer a recommended pitch: “Sign this referendum to repeal the Borough’s power plant ordinance so that MEA can move ahead with their gas plant.”

It is probably just a difference of interpretation between Leach and the petition worker, who has 10 seconds to make his pitch and maybe can’t squeeze in all the relevant information, Carter said. The person gathering signatures for MEA now has a box of Carter’s business cards, she said, and can hand them out if a potential signer wants to debate the merits of the petition, something the petition taker is not qualified to do.

Carter said the utility’s board believes the ordinance, adopted in August 2007, hinders MEA’s plans to build a 100-megawatt gas-fired generation plant. Two independent consultants have told the utility it can expect to pay about $11 million in additional costs to meet the ordinance’s requirements and wait an additional three to five years to build its plant under the new Borough guidelines.

The Borough has some options for when to put the matter to a vote if the utility gathers the required 1,854 signatures, but Carter expects it will probably be put on the ballot in October.

Leach said his organization supports the Borough ordinance as written and disputes the costs MEA reports. He said for a gas plant, the costs and delay are significantly less than MEA is claiming, according to information he said he’s received from other utilities that have reviewed the ordinance.

Carter is confident in the accuracy of MEA’s figures.

While MEA attempts to get the Borough’s power plant regulations overturned, the elephant in the room is the 100-megawatt coal plant the cooperative had planned to build, but shelved in December for at least five years, citing as one area of concern the Borough’s ordinance.

Leach said he’s worried that if the ordinance is repealed, the coal plant plan will be revived. At some point, the utility might say, “OK, the road’s smoother now and we can pave it with coal,” he said.

Carter said the petition has nothing to do with building a coal plant. Those plans will remain shelved for five years as the board voted to do in December.

She said the utility’s board would be happy if the Borough simply wrote an exemption for gas plants into its ordinance.

“If they do exempt a gas plant from the ordinance, then we will not move forward with the referendum,” Carter said.

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