Firm moves to preserve power plant option
Board to review plan to ban some industries
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A power company tonight will mount a last-minute effort to preserve its right to build a 580-megawatt, gas-fired power plant in Walpole, hoping to head off attempts by Town Meeting members to block the facility.
The proposal from Competitive Power Ventures comes three weeks before the start of the Oct. 20 Town Meeting, which will decide on a warrant article that would amend zoning language to block such industries.
A 15-member committee has worked for months on an overhaul of zoning bylaws, as well as a specific effort to ban power plants, coal elevators, propane farms, and some other unpopular industries in Walpole's industrial areas. The Planning Board will review the warrant article at tonight's meeting.
The proposed overhaul was defeated at March Town Meeting, and the committee was formed shortly afterward. Some residents, who oppose the plant because of pollution and health concerns, were later incensed to learn that as late as five days before the vote, Competitive Power had held a series of meetings in private homes with dozens of Representative Town Meeting members.
So, questions arose last week when the company, based in Silver Spring, Md., filed an "approval not required" plan with the Planning Board to grandfather the current zoning for the next three years. The company's proposal also moves to protect wetlands at the 14-acre Industrial Road site by asking to set aside a small, environmentally sensitive area as unbuildable.
Planners have 21 days to approve the measure, officials said. A public hearing is not required.
"The [approval-not-required plan], in real terms, is a place holder, put in place to avoid losing rights you had when folks find out you're going to do something," said Competitive Power's vice president, Braith Kelly.
If the Planning Board approves the proposal, the company would have three years to make a formal application and secure the needed governmental approvals for the plant, even if the change in zoning laws is approved at Town Meeting.
Even without Planning Board approval, the company has the option of taking its plan to the Massachusetts Public Utilities Siting Board. The company has been trying to work with the town rather than bypass it and go to the state. "To pit the state against the town is not where we are," said Kelly. "This is as far as we are going to go for the moment."
Walpole selectmen voted in December to send the company packing, to the dismay of neighborhood and business groups who point to the jobs that would be created by the plant, as well as the company's promises of $48 million in incentives over 20 years.
Members of the East Walpole Civic Association, for example, hosted the company at a winter meeting to hear about the proposed plan and its benefits.
"We're not trying to buy our way in," said Kelly. But the unusual confluence of the electrical grid and natural gas lines is too good to pass up, he said. "There will be a power plant someday whether it's us or someone else."
Town Administrator Michael Boynton said selectmen have had no recent discussions with the power company, so their position hasn't changed and "there is nothing new to report."
Finance Committee member Joanne Muti, a former selectwoman and member of the zoning rewrite committee, is one of the plant's fiercest adversaries. Residents expected Competitive Power to try to offset the zoning vote, but no one thought it would center on the environment, a move she said seems disingenuous.
"It's not an act of conservation," Muti said. "But more an act of self-preservation. They aren't trying to protect a wetland. [By law] they can't build on a wetland."
Just last week, the California Legislature rejected a measure sponsored by Competitive Power and
She also noted that in April, the Maryland Senate struggled over a measure intended to reduce air pollution, after Competitive Power said its passage could have threatened plans for a 640-megawatt gas-fired plant in Waldorf.
Opponents have fought the plant for a year and will continue to do so, Muti said. "Three years is a long time. But we have all the time in the world," she said. "And we will decide what to do legally, politically, and technically."
Michele Morgan Bolton can be reached at mmbolton1@verizon.net.
