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However you measure it, the coal terminal proposition has stirred emotions in Bellingham like nothing that’s come along since the Chicago Bridge and Iron scheme of 1982, to build oil drilling platforms—where? Right: Same seacoast, same Cherry Point, even the same parcel of land. That one produced a special interest bill in the state legislature to remove that single stretch of shoreline from the state’s Shoreline Management Act. Despite active opposition in Bellingham, the CBI bill passed both houses in Olympia, supported by both party caucuses.
Washington’s most recent Republican governor, John Spellman, waited until the last possible hour, and vetoed the bill.
“I did it for the fishermen,” Spellman said in an interview last year. “I became persuaded it would be a disaster for the salmon fishery.”
(Spellman blocked two other major industrial proposals at the very same location during his single term in office, both on grounds of irreparable damage to the shoreline and fishery. His party’s leadership turned against him and he lost, badly, to Democrat Booth Gardner.)
There’s been no such attempt by SSA Marine to overturn environmental regulations. In a statement issued Saturday, the company listed some of the environmental issues to be examined in the EIS, and pledged cooperation. (SSA endured trial by embarrassment and a small fine in the summer of 2011, when Council member Weimer stumbled across extensive, illegal wetland grading done in preparation for the project, without the required county permits.)
The public campaign on behalf of Gateway Pacific Terminal is bigger and more sophisticated than CBI’s political bulldozer of 30 years ago. It aims to win over the citizenry, rather than legislators. SSA Marine, coal producers, business trade groups and labor organizations, have formed the Alliance for Northwest Jobs and Exports. That organization has been running TV and newspaper ads aimed at persuading Northwest citizens that coal export will bring economic salvation without degrading the shoreline or the fishery. Even before that campaign began, SSA cited polls in Oregon showing 55 percent support for exporting coal through the Northwest. The company says its own polls in Whatcom and Skagit counties show 59 percent support for the terminal.
Shipping executives and consultants circulated in the halls outside Saturday’s scoping meetings but made no pitch to the scopers to design the study their way.
“The scoping team asked us not to,” Ari Steinberg explained. He is the technical affairs leader for SSA’s permitting effort. Steinberg said the company will prepare a comprehensive statement to be submitted in writing to the scoping panel.
Presumably, the statement will insist that positive economic effects of the project be given equal weight with negative environmental impacts.
That was the theme of a scolding letter that Ken Oplinger, President and CEO of the Bellingham/Whatcom Chamber of Commerce, sent to CH2MHill, the consulting firm hired to oversee the Environmental Impact Study. The Oct. 27 letter complained that the consulting firm had circulated materials that “focus too much attention on the potential negative impacts of the project and very little on the benefits.”
Oplinger asked whether the materials might “imply a biased or lopsided approach to your review of this project.”
SSA executives, consultants and a dozen local union leaders pushed the economic arguments forcefully at a Saturday morning briefing for reporters, ahead of the scoping meeting. Senior Vice President Bob Watters and senior consultant Craig Cole of Bellingham detailed the number of skilled jobs they claim for the terminal.
The job predictions are calculated by a consulting firm, Martin Associates, hired by SSA. They show construction jobs growing from 1,700 to more than 4,400 over the course of two dozen years, just to get the port built and keep it growing. They predict 430 full time workers to operate the terminal at full capacity, in 2026.
Many, perhaps most, will be working for someone other than SSA Marine. They include railroad workers moving coal from the mines to Cherry Point, as well as ship loaders, tugboat operators, bulldozer drivers, truck drivers and other assignments to be negotiated between competing unions.
On the question of the day—the scope of impacts to be studied—SSA has shifted its position from early 2011, when coal export first became a topic of serious public conversation in Bellingham. At that time, SSA’s Bob Watters said of the environmental impact question, “our position would be that the DEIS should relate to the terminal itself and those things we can mitigate. Whatever the impact of the train traffic, that’s not something we can do anything about.”
Since then, it’s become apparent that the impact study will cover a great deal more than Cherry Point and its adjacent waters. The National Environmental Protection Act requires the Army Corps (designated protector against impacts) to consider primary and secondary results. Things like train and ship traffic.
“We’ve learned a lot more about the law since then,” Watters said, noting the company’s experience since they announced the project in 2011. He added that SSA “will agree to whatever the law requires,” regarding the scope of the study.
The critical question in the EIS process is how far beyond Cherry Point the scoping team will want to go. There will be some disagreements. Washington’s Dept. of Ecology, represented by one third of the scoping team, wanted the Army Corps of Engineers to require an EIS for a proposed coal port at the Port of Morrow, at Boardman, Ore., 160 miles upriver from Portland. It’s the first of three proposed coal ports in Washington and Oregon whose backers have applied for permits. Two more Oregon ports are at the rumor stage. Their cumulative impact worries Ecology.
The Morrow/Boardman proposal would ship only 8.8 million tons per year—about one sixth of what SSA plans for Cherry Point. But all of the ports would collect coal from the Powder River Basin in southeastern Montana and northeastern Wyoming, and send it to coal-hungry China. Their combined capacity could be close to 100 million tons a year, about what the entire United States exported last year.
Ecology wants the Corps to consider the whole pattern of coal port plans and hopes, and what it would mean to the region’s railways, air quality and Columbia River traffic if they all get into the business of fueling China’s power plants.
The Corps disagreed. It announced soon after Ecology’s request that it would require the Port Morrow project to provide only an environmental assessment—basically a checklist—with none of the extensive research required for an EIS. However, they can change their minds. Within the rules of the National Environmental Protection Act, the scoping panel can begin with a site-specific study and move to a broader review at any time between now and decision time next year.
The Corps has heard from Washington Senators Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, from Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber and from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, urging a region-wide impact study of the surging coal-to-China phenomenon.
Kitzhaber’s request goes beyond regional, and touches on global warming. The Governor wants the federal government to explain how it can rationalize increased coal exports to China, “with the larger strategy of moving to a lower carbon future.”
The governor’s call for an impact study that might go trans-Pacific found an echo or two at Squalicum High School on Saturday. Monty McIntyre of Bellingham wants the panel to go beyond pollution concerns and consider the value of the Powder River’s high-grade coal and the folly of selling it at depressed prices.
“This is good coal,” McIntyre said. “It’s valuable now, but it’ll be much more valuable once we learn how to use it without releasing carbon.
“But we’re subsidizing coal companies by letting them dig it out of public land, letting them sell it to China, to our number one competitor. Then we buy back China’s manufactured stuff,” he said.
McIntyre’s comments sounded vaguely familiar. Sixty-some years ago, a college textbook on agricultural economics explained how people in parts of Africa and Asia were coerced into exporting raw materials, buying back finished products, and living in poverty. Their plight was described under the heading, “Resource Colonies.”
Photos by Paul K. Anderson..
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Half a mile of disputatious road signs, narrowly spaced, lined both sides of the street leading to Squalicum High School Saturday morning. They bore slogans naming coal as a jobs provider, as a jobs killer; a producer of the good life, a destroyer of living creatures.
At 9:45, a long line waited for the building to open. Just why they needed to line up outside instead of inside was not made clear to those in line. Some had been there since 7:30, in an intermittent rain, and were still friendly. By the end of the day, more than 2,000 had come and gone.
In the gym and in the auditorium, a panel of decision makers awaited suggestions. Tell us what to study, they asked. The three—Randel Perry of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Alice Kelly of the State Department of Ecology, and Tyler Schroeder of Whatcom County’s Department of Planning and Development—will oversee the process that shapes the Environmental Impact Study of the Gateway Pacific Terminal that SSA Marine wishes to build at Cherry Point.
They got an earful. Two minutes at a time, censure piled on denouncement of the incipient coal port that would be North America’s largest. In between “don’t allow it” and “just say no,” the beginnings of a study emerged. Study the noise from the hundreds of trains bringing the coal from Wyoming. Study the impact of coal dust on eelgrass that’s home to the dwindling stock of a once-great herring resource at Cherry Point. Examine the threat to the ancestral home of the Lummis, including their burial grounds.
Measure the risk of collision, citizens urged, between an oil tanker and a coal-hauling ship longer than three football fields, deep as a seven-story building, in the waters of Puget Sound. Measure that same threat in the narrow, storm-harrowed shipping lanes of the Aleutian Islands, up-current from America’s richest fishing grounds.
Envision a fire truck or ambulance halted at a crossing, while a mile-long train goes by. Consider diesel fumes from slow moving and long-idling trains. Study airborne coal pollution, blowing back from power plants in China.
Listeners were asked not to applaud, but to raise their hands instead, if they wished to show support for a speaker. They raised their hands and stomped their feet on the bleachers. The sound of clapping morphed into the sound of horses galloping on a bridge.
Two or three spoke bravely in support of the terminal and the high-paying jobs its developers promise. They were politely and quietly heard.
No one spoke for the City of Bellingham nor Whatcom County.
Mayor Kelli Linville had issued a statement Friday, urging citizens to attend, noting that the mayor and bellingham City Council will send a scoping letter. It will, presumably, support the concept of a broad, cumulative-impact study, aimed at perceiving what damage might result if all five coal ports proposed for Washington and Oregon were to be approved.
Whatcom County Council members were told to stay away. The county’s legal staff wants them to see no port, hear no port, speak no port, and to read nothing about the biggest coal export terminal on the continent. They worry about the appearance of fairness. Council members (except for those who may lose in 2014 when four incumbents are up for re-election) are the final deciders, the ones who will vote, at last, maybe two years from now, whether to approve SSA’s permit to build the terminal. They are to remain innocent of any knowledge concerning the most important issue they’ll ever vote on, so no one can claim undue influence by the opposing side.
County Council member Carl Weimer showed up anyway, chatted with commenters in the hallways and addressed a small group of constituents outside. No one arrested him.
Before this first day of scoping, the team had received more than 3,300 comments by postal mail and email. They’ll accept public comment for three more months, and the volume may set a new record. The largest EIS the Corps’ Seattle District ever experienced, as measured by the number who commented, involved the third runway at Seattle-Tacoma Airport in the mid-1990s. This one just might be larger, Corps staff said. Not a perfect gauge of public sentiment, however. It’s a lot easier to comment in today’s hyper-electronic age than it was in the semi-tech period of 16 years ago. You need travel only as far as .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) and start typing. You have until Jan. 21 to decide what you want to say. [Suggestion: if you want your comment to count, begin with the words “Please study the…”]
However you measure it, the coal terminal proposition has stirred emotions in Bellingham like nothing that’s come along since the Chicago Bridge and Iron scheme of 1982, to build oil drilling platforms—where? Right: Same seacoast, same Cherry Point, even the same parcel of land. That one produced a special interest bill in the state legislature to remove that single stretch of shoreline from the state’s Shoreline Management Act. Despite active opposition in Bellingham, the CBI bill passed both houses in Olympia, supported by both party caucuses.
Washington’s most recent Republican governor, John Spellman, waited until the last possible hour, and vetoed the bill.
“I did it for the fishermen,” Spellman said in an interview last year. “I became persuaded it would be a disaster for the salmon fishery.”
(Spellman blocked two other major industrial proposals at the very same location during his single term in office, both on grounds of irreparable damage to the shoreline and fishery. His party’s leadership turned against him and he lost, badly, to Democrat Booth Gardner.)
There’s been no such attempt by SSA Marine to overturn environmental regulations. In a statement issued Saturday, the company listed some of the environmental issues to be examined in the EIS, and pledged cooperation. (SSA endured trial by embarrassment and a small fine in the summer of 2011, when Council member Weimer stumbled across extensive, illegal wetland grading done in preparation for the project, without the required county permits.)
The public campaign on behalf of Gateway Pacific Terminal is bigger and more sophisticated than CBI’s political bulldozer of 30 years ago. It aims to win over the citizenry, rather than legislators. SSA Marine, coal producers, business trade groups and labor organizations, have formed the Alliance for Northwest Jobs and Exports. That organization has been running TV and newspaper ads aimed at persuading Northwest citizens that coal export will bring economic salvation without degrading the shoreline or the fishery. Even before that campaign began, SSA cited polls in Oregon showing 55 percent support for exporting coal through the Northwest. The company says its own polls in Whatcom and Skagit counties show 59 percent support for the terminal.
Shipping executives and consultants circulated in the halls outside Saturday’s scoping meetings but made no pitch to the scopers to design the study their way.
“The scoping team asked us not to,” Ari Steinberg explained. He is the technical affairs leader for SSA’s permitting effort. Steinberg said the company will prepare a comprehensive statement to be submitted in writing to the scoping panel.
Presumably, the statement will insist that positive economic effects of the project be given equal weight with negative environmental impacts.
That was the theme of a scolding letter that Ken Oplinger, President and CEO of the Bellingham/Whatcom Chamber of Commerce, sent to CH2MHill, the consulting firm hired to oversee the Environmental Impact Study. The Oct. 27 letter complained that the consulting firm had circulated materials that “focus too much attention on the potential negative impacts of the project and very little on the benefits.”
Oplinger asked whether the materials might “imply a biased or lopsided approach to your review of this project.”
SSA executives, consultants and a dozen local union leaders pushed the economic arguments forcefully at a Saturday morning briefing for reporters, ahead of the scoping meeting. Senior Vice President Bob Watters and senior consultant Craig Cole of Bellingham detailed the number of skilled jobs they claim for the terminal.
The job predictions are calculated by a consulting firm, Martin Associates, hired by SSA. They show construction jobs growing from 1,700 to more than 4,400 over the course of two dozen years, just to get the port built and keep it growing. They predict 430 full time workers to operate the terminal at full capacity, in 2026.
Many, perhaps most, will be working for someone other than SSA Marine. They include railroad workers moving coal from the mines to Cherry Point, as well as ship loaders, tugboat operators, bulldozer drivers, truck drivers and other assignments to be negotiated between competing unions.
On the question of the day—the scope of impacts to be studied—SSA has shifted its position from early 2011, when coal export first became a topic of serious public conversation in Bellingham. At that time, SSA’s Bob Watters said of the environmental impact question, “our position would be that the DEIS should relate to the terminal itself and those things we can mitigate. Whatever the impact of the train traffic, that’s not something we can do anything about.”
Since then, it’s become apparent that the impact study will cover a great deal more than Cherry Point and its adjacent waters. The National Environmental Protection Act requires the Army Corps (designated protector against impacts) to consider primary and secondary results. Things like train and ship traffic.
“We’ve learned a lot more about the law since then,” Watters said, noting the company’s experience since they announced the project in 2011. He added that SSA “will agree to whatever the law requires,” regarding the scope of the study.
The critical question in the EIS process is how far beyond Cherry Point the scoping team will want to go. There will be some disagreements. Washington’s Dept. of Ecology, represented by one third of the scoping team, wanted the Army Corps of Engineers to require an EIS for a proposed coal port at the Port of Morrow, at Boardman, Ore., 160 miles upriver from Portland. It’s the first of three proposed coal ports in Washington and Oregon whose backers have applied for permits. Two more Oregon ports are at the rumor stage. Their cumulative impact worries Ecology.
The Morrow/Boardman proposal would ship only 8.8 million tons per year—about one sixth of what SSA plans for Cherry Point. But all of the ports would collect coal from the Powder River Basin in southeastern Montana and northeastern Wyoming, and send it to coal-hungry China. Their combined capacity could be close to 100 million tons a year, about what the entire United States exported last year.
Ecology wants the Corps to consider the whole pattern of coal port plans and hopes, and what it would mean to the region’s railways, air quality and Columbia River traffic if they all get into the business of fueling China’s power plants.
The Corps disagreed. It announced soon after Ecology’s request that it would require the Port Morrow project to provide only an environmental assessment—basically a checklist—with none of the extensive research required for an EIS. However, they can change their minds. Within the rules of the National Environmental Protection Act, the scoping panel can begin with a site-specific study and move to a broader review at any time between now and decision time next year.
The Corps has heard from Washington Senators Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, from Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber and from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, urging a region-wide impact study of the surging coal-to-China phenomenon.
Kitzhaber’s request goes beyond regional, and touches on global warming. The Governor wants the federal government to explain how it can rationalize increased coal exports to China, “with the larger strategy of moving to a lower carbon future.”
The governor’s call for an impact study that might go trans-Pacific found an echo or two at Squalicum High School on Saturday. Monty McIntyre of Bellingham wants the panel to go beyond pollution concerns and consider the value of the Powder River’s high-grade coal and the folly of selling it at depressed prices.
“This is good coal,” McIntyre said. “It’s valuable now, but it’ll be much more valuable once we learn how to use it without releasing carbon.
“But we’re subsidizing coal companies by letting them dig it out of public land, letting them sell it to China, to our number one competitor. Then we buy back China’s manufactured stuff,” he said.
McIntyre’s comments sounded vaguely familiar. Sixty-some years ago, a college textbook on agricultural economics explained how people in parts of Africa and Asia were coerced into exporting raw materials, buying back finished products, and living in poverty. Their plight was described under the heading, “Resource Colonies.”
Photos by Paul K. Anderson..
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