Lordstown residents express satisfaction with new power plant site

By Ed Runyan

runyan@vindy.com

LORDSTOWN

Donna Schrader listed several reasons she’s happy Clean Energy Future has settled on the Lordstown Industrial Park as an alternative site for the $800 million power plant it wants to build in the village.

She said the site in the industrial park on the west side of Tod Avenue will prevent the loss of farmland and it will go in an area already zoned industrial.

But the more poignant reason was this one: “Lordstown is special,” she said at Tuesday night’s public informational meeting.

Schrader said the village established a development plan when it became a village in 1975 that kept industrial, residential and agricultural uses separate to make Lordstown a nice place to live.

Why set aside those plans now by allowing Clean Energy Future to put its power plant along Salt Springs Road near homes? she asked. In addition, how many more variances to the zoning would take place if this “spot zoning” had been approved, she said.

“This is where it should have been in the first place,” she said of the industrial park just east of GM Lordstown. “I think everybody’s happy now.”

Residents such as Schrader stood in the way of Clean Energy Future’s getting the zoning variance it needed to put the gas-to-electric plant on Salt Springs Road.

But Lordstown Mayor Arno Hill and Clean Energy Future President Bill Siderewicz of Boston continued to look at other sites, leading eventually to the industrial park.

One woman who spoke to Siderewicz on Tuesday expressed her thanks to him for continuing to consider Lordstown.

Siderewicz said afterward that changing to the industrial park will result in an increase in cost of $8 million to $9 million because the company will have to install a 3,400-foot “extension cord” from the plant to the First Energy power lines.

The Salt Springs Road location would have required “zero feet” of extension cord, Siderewicz said.

The 800-megawatt plant will provide between $1 million and $1.5 million in revenue per year to the Lordstown schools, said Terry Armstrong, schools superintendent.

And the project will generate $3 million per year in revenue for local governments providing water and treating wastewater, Siderewicz said. It will create 25 to 28 permanent jobs with payroll and benefits of $3.5 million annually, he added. Construction is planned to start in September, and commercial operations could begin in May 2018.

There are still potential problems that could prevent the plant from moving forward — a change in the demand for power, an economic decline or excessive requirements from state officials — but Siderewicz said he doesn’t foresee those things happening.

“We’re 90 percent positive we’ll get to the finish line,” he said.