News

Her Dirty Secret

Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius preaches green, but her heart seems as black as coal.

By Carolyn Szczepanski 

Nobody was expecting an angry, overflow crowd at a tedious public hearing.

Stunned by the turnout one evening last November, state employees stood in the hallway of the Kansas Memorial Union on the University of Kansas campus like a pack of deer in headlights. Two Lawrence police officers who'd been expecting an easy night baby-sitting a public meeting were suddenly standing at attention outside the Malott Room. As the crowd pressed in, a KU official beat back complaints with increasingly flustered refrains of "no, this is the biggest room we have available tonight."

Who knew that hundreds would show up to voice their opinions about an air permit for a couple of power plants in tiny Holcomb — a good six-hour drive from the KU campus? Certainly not the Kansas Department of Health and Environment employees, who scrambled to get people signed in to speak during the hearing. As the corridor teemed with increasingly agitated people from cities across eastern Kansas, the few state and university officials clearly worried that they had a riot of students, scholars and otherwise mild-mannered Midwesterners on their hands.

An hour before the meeting, environmental activists had held a press conference down the hall. Charles Benjamin, then a lobbyist for the Kansas Sierra Club, had explained that the group was opposed to the Sunflower Electric Power Corporation's plans to build two new power plants.

Local and national environmentalists were fired up because the new complex would burn massive amounts of coal, potentially endangering the health of Kansans and spewing carbon dioxide, a potent greenhouse gas.

"Kansas will be number one in something," Benjamin said sarcastically. "We'll become the poster child for global warming."

By the time the press conference broke, a crowd was milling in the hallway. People grumbled that the hearing had been hijacked. The state had reserved a room that could seat only 100 people, and 50 of those seats were occupied by professionally dressed western Kansans — many of them employees of Sunflower Electric and the Garden City Chamber of Commerce — who were eager to support a power plant that they viewed as an economic engine.

Outside, 200 people had come to oppose a plan that they saw as an environmental catastrophe.

After the hearing began at 7 p.m., KDHE officials were constantly interrupted by angry attendees as police tried to thin the over-capacity crowd.

"I will not move. This is my constitutional right!" a student protested, snatching his arm from the grasp of a police officer trying to lead him into the hallway.

"This meeting is a joke," another man yelled as he was escorted out.

When it became obvious that the crowd wouldn't disperse, KU employees opened a room next door. They ran a microphone from the hearing so that everyone could hear. Hundreds of people had signed up to speak. When the moderator called the name of one of those waiting in the adjacent room, the speaker would dash across the hall, with fellow citizens cheering as if the person were a football player running onto a field.

As the night wore on, dozens of doctors and farmers (and kids so young, they could barely see over the lectern) talked about Sunflower's project squandering precious water, polluting the air and failing to cash in on Kansas' best energy asset: wind.

With the Union closing at 11 p.m., it was obvious that not everyone would get a chance to speak.

"How about we sit down outside the door until we get a commitment for another hearing?" a voice yelled from the back. "Don't let them out of the building!"

Marci Francisco, a Democratic state senator from Lawrence, took the mic.

"I think we need to talk about how we might want to respond by contacting the governor," she said.

Over the next eight months, though, it would become clear that Democratic Governor Kathleen Sebelius has distanced herself from the state's biggest energy battle.

Holcomb is 400 miles west of KU. Named after a local hog farmer, the town was immortalized by Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, about the murder of the Clutter family there.

Now the town of 2,000 is making national news again as the city with plans to build a massive new coal-fired power complex, when the rest of the nation is trying to scale back its reliance on a fuel that adds to global warming.

The Sunflower Electric Power Corporation already owns one coal-fired power plant in Holcomb. Sunflower boasts that the facility has been a model of environmental responsibility over the past two decades. When it was built in 1983, says Sunflower spokesman Steve Miller, the plant was the seventh-cleanest coal-fired plant in the country. Since then, it has never been cited for any environmental violations. In fact, Sunflower recently partnered with the federal government to test new techniques to remove significant amounts of mercury — a toxic metal — from the gases streaming out of its smokestacks.

In February 2006, Sunflower told the KDHE that it intended to build three new, bigger plants. This June, the company pulled one of the plants from its application, but Miller says the third plant isn't off the table; it's just delayed.

He says the company needs the extra power to satisfy the growing demands of its 122,000 customers spread across the western half of the state. The company looked into adding wind turbines — Kansas is ranked third in the nation for wind-power potential — but decided that burning coal from Wyoming would be cheaper and more reliable.

Because it had the space to build big, Sunflower also went shopping for energy customers outside state lines.

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