Lordstown gets second multimillion-dollar power plant
By Ed Runyan
LORDSTOWN
“I never thought I’d see a project of this magnitude,” Mayor Arno Hill said during a news conference to announce that Clean Energy Future plans to build a second $890 million gas-fired power plant in the village.
“Right now, everybody is so upbeat,” the mayor said Wednesday, touching on the additional revenue the school district is likely to receive and the additional two years’ worth of construction salaries that will be earned.
If everything works out this year, construction of the second facility just south of the one being built now will begin sometime in early 2018 and extend construction into 2020.
Perhaps the best way to glimpse the magnitude of building two power plants next to each other is to drive near the construction site for the first plant, called the Lordstown Energy Center.
It now has hundreds of workers, some operating cranes that loom in the Lordstown skyline, lifting components into place.
Construction is expected to wrap up in May or June 2018. They will both be built on Henn Parkway in the Lordstown Industrial Park.
A huge mound of dirt south of the Lordstown Energy Center is where the second plant will be built, to be called the Trumbull Energy Center.
Bill Siderewicz, president of the Clean Energy Future, which is developing the projects, said the existence of low-cost natural gas in this region makes these facilities practical. Most of the gas that will be used in the plants will come from Ohio, he said.
The demand for the power Clean Energy Future will generate comes from coal-powered plants that are closing, Siderewicz said.
But other power companies operating in Ohio will take aim at Clean Energy Future in the coming months, lobbying state officials to change the state’s laws in the coming months, he said.
Clean Energy Future will apply for permits from the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency and Ohio Power Citing Board in the next three to four weeks, Siderewicz said.
Tony DiTommasso Jr. of the Regional Council of Carpenters union in Boardman, said his unit has more than 70 laborers working at the site now, and that’s expected to grow to 100 this summer when the total number of workers grows to about 500.
DiTommasso said the Lordstown power plants are an opportunity to educate the public on the growing opportunities for young people to learn a skilled trade through apprenticeship programs offered by his and other craft unions.
The pay during an apprenticeship grows from $10 per hour to start to $25.86 at the end. The training can be a launchpad for careers earning six-figure salaries, he said.
DiTommasso said he would like young people from the Mahoning Valley to take advantage of the opportunities in the trades “instead of calling our local in Akron and asking for some guys,” he said.
Siderewicz said about $92 million of the $890 million investment in each plant is from wages paid to construction workers.
Those wages will have positive implications for the village, he said. Lordstown’s 1 percent income tax will generate about $920,000 worth of Lordstown income taxes for each plant.
When the plants are up and running, each will generate about $1 million per year of income taxes being paid to the village, he added.
The city of Warren will receive about $2 million per year of revenue per plant by providing water to the plants and $500,000 per year treating wastewater, Siderewicz said.
Terry Armstrong, superintendent of Lordstown Schools, issued a news release saying the announcement of a second power plant “could not have been timed better.”
“The financial impact of the agreement for the first facility was a game-changer for the immediate future of Lordstown Local Schools,” Armstrong said.
“The first agreement also provided funds to demolish a school building that has been closed for over five years and to build a soccer/track complex at Lordstown schools promising our student-athletes an exciting future.
“The second facility will provide long-term budget stability in the face of declining state tangible personal property [tax] reimbursement revenue for Lordstown Schools,” he said. “We realize, as a district, how fortunate of a situation this is for us.”