Unions End Effort Against City Exemption
Riverside: The coalition asks an energy panel to require people to stay away from a plant-project site.
By Doug Haberman
Published December 9, 2004
Reprinted with permission from The Press-Enterprise

The coalition of labor unions fighting against fast-track approval by the California Energy Commission for the city's proposed 96-megawatt power plant dropped its opposition this week.

A committee comprising two of the commission's five members recommended last month that the full commission grant an exemption to the project so that the city would not need to conduct a full environmental impact review.

The commission votes on the project on Wednesday in Sacramento.

Further opposition seems pointless, Marc D. Joseph, attorney for the California Unions for Reliable Energy, said Wednesday.

"It would be very unusual for the three members who are not part of the committee to say, 'We are going the other way,'" he said. CURE's opposition was based on the plant's potential environmental impacts.

Steve Badgett, Riverside's assistant utilities director for energy delivery, welcomed CURE's decision to withdraw.

"It demonstrates what we felt all along: Our project is not harmful."

The $75 million natural-gas-fired plant is a candidate for the special exemption because it would generate fewer than 100 megawatts of electricity.

The plant is designed to produce power to avoid summer blackouts.

"We recognize the commission's concerns about the adequacy of generation supply," Joseph said.

CURE's involvement in the case did delay the project. Once set to begin operation in summer 2005, the plant is now on a schedule that would have the first of two turbines operating in October and the second in November, Badgett said.

At this point CURE is only asking the commission to require the city to keep people away from the project site, off Jurupa Avenue between Payton Avenue and Acorn Street next to the city's wastewater treatment plant, during the three weeks of heavy earthmoving anticipated before the plant gets built.

That would spare those people exposure to minute dust particles that can damage the lungs, Joseph said.

CURE is also seeking to remove language from the commission's decision that says it intervenes in power-plant projects that come before the commission in order to force the applicants to use union labor on the projects. Joseph has regularly denied this is CURE's motivation.

The City Council in July awarded a $25 million construction contract to a company that does not use union labor. CURE then began fighting the city's application to the commission for exemption, arguing the project would have serious environmental impacts requiring full review.

Matt Tennis, a lobbyist for Associated Builders and Contractors of California, whose members are non-union contractors, said CURE has intervened successfully in private power projects for years but didn't fare as amid the exposure of a public project.

"When you turn the lights on in a dark room, sometimes you don't know what's going to go scurrying for cover," he said.