AES Sues County Over LNG Law
COMMENT: Any guesses as to whether AES is talking with its lawyers about AESWapiti?
Protests second attempt at legal roadblock to plan
by Joseph M. Giordano
Dundalk Eagle
Feb 21, 2007
After beating Baltimore County in U.S. District Court last month, AES Sparrows Point is gearing up for another court battle over a new law passed by the County Council to prevent the construction of a controversial LNG plant.
On Feb. 7, Virginia-based AES filed another lawsuit against the county in U.S. District Court after the council voted unanimously to add liquefied natural gas facilities to a list of industries, like hazardous waste processing plants, that the county considers part of the Chesapeake Bay Critical Area.
The measure is an attempt to ban the LNG plant that AES is proposing to build at the site of the former Sparrows Point Shipyard by placing the area under federal jurisdiction for such projects.
With or without the new county law, a federal government agency will determine whether to approve the AES plan. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission now is reviewing the company’s proposal.
“We urge you not to enact a law that we fully anticipate will be found unconstitutional,” wrote AES’s project manager, Kent Morton, in a Feb. 1 letter to council chairman Samuel Moxley after the vote. “Such developments do lasting harm to the integrity of the legislative process, erode public trust and, in this case, are entirely unnecessary.”
Morton, who referred to the letter for comment, also addressed officials who voted for the new law.
“We understand that some officials and citizens have voiced concerns about our proposed project,” Morton wrote. “There is a process in place to address these concerns that does not involve the inappropriate use of legal zoning legislation.”
But county spokesman Don Mohler said the new law is stronger than the old one, which sought to bar LNG facilities from operating less than five miles from a residential area.
Last month, a U.S. District Court judge ruled that county zoning ordinance unconstitutional.
“We’re only asking that the state consider that land as a part of the Chesapeake Bay Critical Area,” Mohler said last week. “If it’s added to the list, then it will be rolled over to the federal program. Our lawyers think it’s pretty foolproof.”
Since January 2006, AES has been fending off complaints about its proposed $400 million, 60-acre LNG facility that would include an 80-mile pipeline to a plant in Pennsylvania.
On Feb. 1, the company issued a 60-page rebuttal to the findings of the state-appointed LNG Task Force.
A few of the points brought up in the report included accusing local task force members Sharon Beazley — who heads the LNG Opposition Team — Fred Thiess, Linwood Jackson, Russell Donnelly, Dunbar Brooks and Guido Guarnaccia of being biased against the proposed plan because of their membership on the opposition team.
The AES report offered as one example Beazley’s refusal to accept the company’s invitation to tour the Maritime Institute of Technology and Graduate Studies, an education facility created to train mariners on LNG vessels in Linthicum.
“Thank you but no thank you,” was Beazley’s reported answer.
Other points include that task force’s insistence that the public is against the construction of the plant.
In August, the company paid the polling agency Mason-Dixon to conduct a poll of both local and state residents about the plant’s construction.
The poll found that a majority of Maryland voters — 52 percent — supported the construction of the proposed LNG facility on the site of the old shipyard.
Also, 40 percent of local residents approve of the LNG plant while 46 percent oppose it, according to the poll.
The polling results were included in AES’s report.
The report also called task force findings about the possible impact on the area’s commercial and recreational fishing “not consistent with the facts relative to the proposed terminal site. The area [that would have to be dredged to support LNG ships] does not support either significant fisheries for recreational or commercial exploitations.”
After reading a copy of the report, Beazley was amused to find the accusations of bias.
“It made me laugh,” Beazley said Monday. “We researched and evaulated all of the information before we made our conclusions. The whole task force had a say. This was not [just about] AES. It was about keeping a dangerous LNG plant off the [Sparrows Point peninsula].”
Posted by Arthur Caldicott on 21 Feb 2007