TOWN FIRED UP

Sunday, April 1, 2007 | 7:34 a.m.

McGill — To David Sims, the desert valley outside this sleepy Northern Nevada town seems the perfect place for a power plant.

There are water, train tracks to carry coal, only one nearby ranch and no pesky bogs or rough terrain to get in the way of construction.

And it's close enough to civilization to make it an attractive place for workers to settle, but not so close as to rile the neighbors.

At least, that's what Sims thought when he started selling a $3.8 billion coal-fired electric generating station around town on behalf of the Nevada Power Co.

Sims, director of project development for Nevada Power who is as forthright as a Boy Scout, tells anyone who will listen that the plant is needed to power one-quarter of Las Vegas, with its ever-growing need for air conditioning and neon lights, on the hottest day of the year.

And who - around here, at least - would stand in its way? After all, a proposal for a second plant in a neighboring valley has met little opposition so far.

But folks here aren't as welcoming as he had hoped - folks like Rick Spilsbury, a 47-year-old Indian arts and crafts wholesaler who followed his parents north from Las Vegas a year ago.

Sims and Spilsbury have no personal enmity toward one another, mind you, but they sure don't see eye to eye, either.

Where Sims pictures the largest power project in Nevada since the Hoover Dam - with a 700-foot smokestack, a one-square-mile landfill big enough for 50 years of ash and sludge and two 750-megawatt turbines - Spilsbury sees flocks of sheep grazing bucolically on sagebrush.

And where Sims imagines trains, heavy machinery and tons of coal - all in the name of providing electricity for Southern Nevada - Spilsbury pictures elk climbing the mountainside at sunset.

"It would be like putting a coal-fired power plant at the entrance to Red Rock Canyon," Spilsbury says of the collision of industry and nature.

What sounds almost quaint - the Ely Energy Center - would pollute the air and deplete the ground water , drive off wildlife and mar views of this scenic hunting and fishing ground, Spilsbury says.

But Sims is undeterred. No matter where the plant is built, he knows he'll make enemies. So let's see, he says, if we can at least make some friends in McGill.

Sims shows up for a public meeting 10 miles down the road at Ely's convention center with a laptop computer loaded with a slick PowerPoint presentation, maps of the two-square-mile power plant site, chewy sugar cookies and locally bottled Elyon water.

Power company employees unstack more metal chairs to accommodate the crowd, which - at least when it comes to power plants - is as likely to be sniping at one another as at the neatly coifed experts in matching Nevada Power Co. shirts.

Local folks shift in their chairs and square off over how much money the utility will make at their expense versus how much money the region stands to make thanks to the project. Spilsbury and his 70-year-old mother, Delaine, are in the audience.

Nevada Power will build the cleanest coal-fired power plant in the West, Sims promises.

In fact, he points out, it will eliminate 90 percent to 95 percent more of the harmful emissions than the Mohave Generating Station near Laughlin, which was shut down less than two years ago after filling the Grand Canyon with smog.

Yes, the Ely plant will spew 10 million tons of carbon dioxide each year as well as tons of nitrogen and sulfur oxides and arsenic, formaldehyde and other toxins. But that's nothing compared with Mohave's emissions, Sims points out again.

Spilsbury grows curious. Why all the comparisons to the Mohave power plant?

Little did he realize that before Mohave opened in 1970, power company officials promised that it would be the cleanest power plant of its time. And he would learn that those promises collapsed.

"The Mohave power plant will have no significant effect on the environment in the vicinity of the plant," a spokesman for Southern California Edison electric company told a reporter for the Mohave Valley News in Bullhead City, Ariz., in 1969.

At the time Laughlin, across the river, was no bigger than McGill is today.

Southern California Edison owned most of the power plant. Nevada Power, the utility proposing to build the Ely Energy Center, owned 14 percent.

Within two months of opening, the plant had been hit with a half-dozen clean-air violations from Clark County's air pollution control division.

Utility officials claimed that they were just testing the plant, that they'd had problems with machinery and that it had not been designed to meet strict air quality standards and visible emissions requirements enacted a year earlier.

But it just got worse. In the following months, the plant was slapped with more than 20 violations.

"During the '70s and '80s you would have to wipe your car off because the soot was literally all over your vehicle," recalls Jack Ehrhardt, planning and economic development director for the Hualapai Nation , which lived across the river from the plant. "When the wind blew in the wintertime over the town - and there would be times, especially at night when they would really open that thing up - that you would gasp for air because you could just smell the toxins."

The plant belched 8,000 times the legal limit of sulfur into the atmosphere.

An Edison official publicly acknowledged in 1971 that the plant had the worst record of any in the company's history.

But for years the plant's owners - Edison, Nevada Power, the Salt River Project and the Los Angeles Water and Power Department - ignored the law.

Clark County built a solid case against Mohave in the plant's early years, but the utilities' lawyers and a cadre of experts and engineers delayed enforcement of regulations again and again. Even the Environmental Protection Agency lacked the political will to shut down the $190 million plant. It would be nearly 30 years until anyone was willing to go head to head with its operators in court.

And so the plant belched black smoke and ash and poured millions of tons of carbon, sulfur, mercury and other pollutants into the air.

Polluting the Grand Canyon was the plant's undoing. Environmentalists successfully sued the plant's operators in 2000 to force installation of $400 million in emission controls within six years.

But when time ran out, Edison simply closed the plant rather than comply.

Bob Teasdale, a 65-year-old retired ironworker who moved to Bullhead City full time in 2000 after purchasing a weekend home there in 1984, says he breathed easier - literally - the day the plant closed.

"Two days before you could hardly see anything in this valley. You could hardly see those mountains," he said, pointing to the peaks that surround the power plant and adding that, being from California, he knows smog. "When that thing closed up, this is what you see every day. It's crystal clear."

The sky over the Steptoe Valley outside McGill is a remarkable blue - and Spilsbury wants to keep it that way. The Ely Energy Center could jeopardize that, he says.

While Spilsbury fears pollution, others anticipate McGill - an old mining town with 1,000 residents, one store, a gas station and a lone bar - pulling itself further out of economic stagnation. There's a bit of a boom under way in the area, thanks to a reopened copper mine and a prison that employs 340 people. Just think, they say, what a power plant could do for the economy.

"I don't see any drawbacks," said 63-year-old Brent Eldridge, White Pine County Commission chairman . A plant "will represent an opportunity for some of our young folks to stay in the community. I hear that a lot: 'If only my son or daughter could find a job here, they'd love to stay.' "

He doesn't worry about what the plant might do to the environment.

Old-timers recall when the Kennecott Minerals Co. copper smelter in the center of McGill spewed sulfur so thick it would knock a man to his knees. They say a power plant outside town couldn't possibly be worse.

"I've been here all my life and I've eaten all that Kennecott smoke. Hell, that would put hair on your chest," said Norm Linell, the 85-year-old bartender pouring beer and whiskey shots at The McGill Club. He'd love a bump in business from power plant workers.

The fellow who runs the gas station agrees.

But Kathey Tefft, who owns a weekend house in McGill and lives full time in Las Vegas, remembers the smoggy air over Searchlight near the Mohave plant. It was worse than any smelter, she said.

John Countryman worries, too. He moved to McGill three years ago with his wife of 49 years, Becky, to escape Las Vegas and be closer to their teenage grandsons.

"I can understand Southern Nevada's insatiable growth, but when you run out of resources you have to stop and think," he said. "If the plant is next door, yeah, I am worried about my health and my children's children's health. You just don't build something like that next to a town."

Eldridge says critics should consider more than scenic views.

"So many folks want progress, but they don't want the negative spin-off in their back yard ," Eldridge said. "And so it's not going to please everyone when either or both plants are sited, but they are good for our community, no matter what."

Indeed. The coal plant would double White Pine County's tax revenue, he points out.

Many McGill residents wouldn't be so opposed to the power plant if it were built farther from town. But Ely wouldn't enjoy the economic benefits as much.

To build its plant near McGill, the utility would have to restore the existing railroad - which Eldridge says would attract manufacturing plants to Ely.

Countryman says it's easy for Ely folks to forget about the negative effects the plant could have on McGill.

"The people who are making all the decisions about this power plant live in the city," he said. "They're not going to see it, they're not going to hear it, they're not going to smell it. It's easy to make that type of decision.

"If the people in Ely want it so damn bad, put it right downtown."

But there's resignation here that, for all the protests, the plant in the Steptoe Valley outside McGill is a done deal.

It would be built on land controlled by the Bureau of Land Management, which is conducting an environmental impact study. The plant also would need other federal agencies' approval.

But the Nevada Public Utilities Commission has approved a long-range plan for Nevada Power and its parent company, Sierra Pacific, that includes the coal-fired plant. The commission authorized the utility to spend $300 million to begin development of the Ely Energy Center. That sends a message.

Still, Jack Ehrhardt, one of the plaintiffs in the case that closed Mohave, urges opponents in McGill to not give up.

Job one, he said, is to get all the facts, "because they just don't tell the truth, power companies."

Sims acknowledges that opposition to the power plant is growing. The problems at the Mohave plant didn't help his case.

But he still likes the look of this valley.