Damage Control

This looked like a victory for opponents who had been fighting the power plants for months. But it could be just another headline for northlanders to decode after they've spent an exhausting year tracking the company's vague and ever-changing messages.

On September 23, 2003, the Star's Steve Everly reported that Great Plains Energy had hired a new CEO, Michael Chesser. Everly wrote, "[Great Plains] also has a subsidiary to build independent power plants, but those plans have been shelved for now."

That came as a big surprise to Melissa Blakley. Working under a 3-month grant to research power plants for the Sierra Club, Blakley had studied the way Great Plains Energy sought permission from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Missouri Department of Natural Resources to begin major construction projects. She fired off an e-mail to Everly at the Star.

"Actually, their plans seem to have not been shelved," Blakley wrote. "GPP [Great Plains Power, a subsidiary of KCPL] submitted public notice to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to build an 850-megawatt unregulated coal-fired power plant near its Iatan plant in May, 2003."

Everly replied right away, Blakley says, noting that the company's spokesman had said nothing about new power plants and asking Blakley to keep him informed.

Blakley had been struggling for more than two months to get the Corps of Engineers to agree to a public hearing about Great Plains' projects before issuing permits for them. (The permitting process can stretch out for years.) The Corps finally agreed not to a public hearing but rather to an "informational meeting" at the Iatan power plant. Representatives from Missouri's departments of natural resources, conservation, and fish and wildlife were invited, along with the Sierra Club, but neither the public nor the press were allowed.

"The media didn't really believe this was happening," Blakley says. So she did the media equivalent of tossing a bucket of blood into the water. "The day of the meeting, I sent a press release about a meeting regarding a project that the company hadn't owned up to," she says. "I decided not to tell the media that they would not be let in. I thought it would be quite effective if the media showed up at Iatan and were not let in. As it turned out, that's exactly what happened."

Had reporters been allowed into the meeting, they would have learned that Great Plains Energy hoped to build two plants.

Blakley says the Sierra Club suspected there might be plans for the Atchison plant. "We saw a KCPL document they sent to the Department of Natural Resources that seemed to reference another plant, so we had a hint but didn't really know," she says. "Then in the meeting, they actually talked about it."

After the Iatan meeting, Blakley headed to the Star to tell Everly what he'd missed. "The next day, he had an article, and one the day after," Blakley recalls.

At first, the company seemed to have been caught off-guard. In the October 30 Star article, Great Plains Energy spokesman Tom Robinson said that construction on the plant near Weston could begin in 2004, depending on factors such as market conditions for selling wholesale power. The next day's newspaper reported what went on to become the Great Plains mantra: Although Great Plains Energy was trying to get permits for the two plants, it hadn't made a final decision about when or even whether to build them.

Nonetheless, the announcement of a possible second power plant resulted in spit takes from civic leaders in Atchison. Mayor Dan Garrity and Commissioner George Ross Jr. both told The Atchison Daily Globe that they'd known nothing about the power company's plans.

This spring, John Grimwade, KCPL's manager of energy-resource management, admitted on KCUR 89.3's Up to Date that the company hadn't been forthright.

"I think the issue of how the information to the public has been probably a little less than what we would have liked to have done," he told host Steve Kraske on May 15.

"Are you saying you wish you'd handled things differently?" Kraske asked.

"In hindsight," Grimwade answered, "looking at controversy that's arisen, obviously we would have probably liked to have had a little bit more open an approach with that, yes."

Corporate spin No. 2
Power plants don't cause mercury poisoning.

Great Plains sees its manifest destiny in the grasses and wetlands that border the Missouri River. Others have been fighting that vision for months.

Susan Brown lives in Dearborn, Missouri, with her husband and two kids at the top of a long, pebbled driveway lined with trees. She grew up on a farm, so when her husband accidentally backed over the family's black dog a month ago, her instinct said "Shoot." Her husband was the one who insisted on taking the animal to the vet (it now lopes around the yard in a blue cast). Clearly, Brown is no bleeding heart. She says she joined the Sierra Club for the free backpack and swears she's not really an environmentalist. She says power plants aren't an environmental issue to her. They're a health issue.