It’s nice to win sometimes, even in absentia…

Tonight the Chisago County Board of Commissioners, on a 3-2 vote, voted NOT to approve their proposed Development Agreement with LS Power for an 855MW (give or take a few hundred, depending on their mood, what they ate for lunch, whatever) natural gas electric generating plant.  Like WOW!

Congratulations to Concerned River Valley Citizens for a job well done, and thanks to Tom Dunnwald who filled in for me tonight, but this is no time to let up — the work’s not over — there’s still the matter of the need for an Overlay Essential Services Ordinance that addresses generating plants and whatever other noxious infrastructure somebody might come up with.

This LS Power mess is the PROCEEDING that Concerned River Valley Citizens intervened in, under the Minnesota Environmental Rights Act, and were shut out by the County Attorney, Janet Reider (bad idea), and we just filed another Notice of Intervention yesterday or today.

There were some interesting comments, like “we’ve done the best we can in the time we had” indicating some sort of train schedule that has now been derailed.  They tried to prevent attorneys from speaking, and the worst of that came from Commissioner Ben Montzka, who is an attorney himself!  He should know better…

In the packet for tonight’s meeting:

Development Agreement

Host Fee Agreement

Host Fee Allocation Agreement

It’s all on video, so we’ll have that soon.  I can’t wait to see the snippets on YouTube!

Here’s from KARE 11:

(it’s not up yet)

More later

Leave a Reply