Damage Control

Brown says she doesn't blame Great Plains for doing what utilities do: in this case, building more power plants. She blames lawmakers for failing to offer incentives or penalties that would force utilities to act more in the interest of public health.

Before a power plant can be built, it must receive permits from the air, water and solid-waste divisions at the Missouri Department of Natural Resources. Kyra Moore, permit section chief for the DNR's Air Pollution Control Program, says her division has turned down only one major air construction permit application (the main permit needed for construction) out of approximately 80 received in the past 20 years.

"It's very rare for us to deny a permit of this size," Moore says.

Corporate spin No. 5
This power is for you.

A merchant power plant -- or, in industry lingo, an "unregulated plant" -- is one that generates energy for a power company to sell on the open market. Regulated plants, however, must sell to all buyers in a specified area. (They're called regulated because they have no market competition; they're essentially monopolies that require oversight by a regulatory agency -- in Missouri's case, the state Public Service Commission -- to make sure that customers get the best rates.)

So if a new plant is regulated, Great Plains can sell the power it generates only to its own customers. (The company says it serves 490,000 customers.)

However, if a plant is unregulated, the power goes to the highest bidder. That represents a bigger risk to Great Plains but also a bigger potential profit.

All of this made Platte County citizens wonder what, if not power, they would get in return for granting permission to make the air quality in their idyllic farm towns a little more like that of New Jersey.

In a May interview with The Kansas City Business Journal, Chesser didn't specify whether the electricity from a new power plant would be for the company's existing customers or for other utilities on the wholesale market. But the company's permit applications for the Weston site indicate that it would be a merchant plant.

In light of those applications, Grimwade's on-air claim in May that new plants would generate energy "for the region" sounded suspect.

Grimwade told 89.3's Kraske on May 15, "From Kansas City Power and Light's perspective, we are looking at the needs of the metropolitan area and for utilities around here. So within Missouri and Kansas for the most part."

Even the good folks in charge of Platte County weren't sure what was really going on -- though they're the ones who signed papers agreeing to help Great Plains finance a new plant.

By the end of June, Platte County Commissioner Steve Wegner was uncertain about the deal he and his two fellow commissioners had closed with Great Plains. When company officials approached county commissioners in 2001, he says, they talked about the county's potential financial benefits from an unregulated plant built in Weston. A power plant, they said, would bring jobs during its construction and then permanent jobs as well as ongoing payments to the county. Great Plains said Platte County could take the deal or leave it -- Great Plains could build 10 miles away in Atchison instead.

On December 12, 2002, the Board of Platte County Commissioners signed an agreement to issue up to $1 billion in bonds to finance construction of the facility.

The way the deal initially stood, Great Plains would build a plant that Platte County would eventually own, and Great Plains wouldn't pay property taxes. Great Plains committed to making payments in lieu of taxes (PILOTs) to the county in the amount of $2.5 million a year. Those funds were contingent on Great Plains building a commercial, unregulated power plant. Wegner says he saw the PILOT funds as a way to help the West Platte School District.

And so Wegner saved an economic opportunity for Platte County from escaping across the river to Kansas. But after the deal went through, Great Plains appeared to change its mind about securing permits for a single plant in either Weston or Atchison. Now, it wanted permits for both. According to documents Great Plains later submitted to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, "When the permit application was submitted for Weston Bend, the Atchison site was an alternative. Now GPP is proceeding with simultaneous permitting of both sites. The two projects are NOT alternatives to each other." It seemed Wegner and the other commissioners had fought to keep the deal in Platte County for nothing.

Wegner says that what he's heard from Great Plains recently suggests that the new plant might be regulated after all.

"This is a whole new area for us, because we had always done our research on this being a merchant plant," he says. "Now, if it is being regulated, it's a whole new set of information we have to find and study and evaluate. Then again, we don't really have a say in it, because now it's between KCPL and the state of Missouri to decide [whether] to regulate it."

Any talk of PILOT funds is pointless, Wegner says, "simply because I understand now they're going for a regulated plant."