Governor Kaine Announces Air Board Appointments

State Air Pollution Control Board


Randolph Gordon M.D. of Mechanicsville, specialist leader at Deloitte Consulting. Gordon holds a master’s degree in Public Health from Johns Hopkins University, a medical degree from the Medical College of Virginia, and fulfills the statutory recommendation that the Air Pollution Control Board have public health representation. He served as the State Health Commissioner from 1995-1998 and is the Chairman of the Board of Trustees for the Rice Center for Environmental Life Sciences at Virginia Commonwealth University, an environmental center focused on education and policy development regarding rivers.

Bernadette W. Reese of Chesapeake, senior environmental engineer and facilities manager at BASF Corporation. As senior environmental engineer, Reese has developed compliance strategies to meet federal, state and local air, water, solid and hazardous waste regulations. Reese holds a degree in chemical engineering from the University of Virginia.

Sterling E. Rives III of the City of Richmond, county attorney for Hanover County. Rives has served as Hanover’s county attorney since 1987. He is a graduate of the T.C. Williams School of Law at the University of Richmond. He served from 1999-2008 on the board of directors for Campaign Virginia, an environmental advocacy group focused on environmentally sound waste management policies.

Dispatches from Wise County, Part 3

Pete RameyThis week I’m going to be in Wise County, where Dominion Power is planning to build a $1.8 billion coal-fired power plant. Members of the Sierra Club, Appalachian Voices, Southern Appalachian Mountain Stewards and CCAN are putting on events around the meeting of the Air Board on Tuesday.

Today was the final day of the Air Board Hearing concerning the Wise County coal plant. The room was full of hope after yesterday’s comment period, and the board acknowledged the powerful citizen outcry over the plant’s health and environmental impacts. But ultimately, they unanimously approved the plant. While they significantly strengthened the emissions regulations, they did nothing to address mountain top removal mining or CO2 emissions.

They went as far as they could, without doing more harm than good. Fearing litigation from Dominion, they made no strong statement about regulating CO2 Continue reading

Dispatches from Wise County, Part 2

mtrThis week I’m going to be in Wise County, where Dominion Power is planning to build a $1.8 billion coal-fired power plant. Members of the Sierra Club, Appalachian Voices, Southern Appalachian Mountain Stewards and CCAN are putting on events around the meeting of the Air Board on Tuesday.

Today I attended the first day of the hearing of the Air Pollution Control Board. As appropriate to hearings, all the arguments were vetted today

Dispatches from Wise County, Part 1

appalachiaThis week I’m going to be in Wise County, where Dominion Power is planning to build a $1.8 billion coal-fired power plant. Members of the Sierra Club, Appalachian Voices, Southern Appalachian Mountain Stewards and CCAN are putting on events around the meeting of the Air Board on Tuesday.

There’s been a lot of talk about the old ways here in Appalachia. Today is the first day of my trip to Wise County to see what we’re fighting for, to get to know the people who are fighting in this community to stop this plant and to attend tomorrow’s Air Board meeting, where they will decide whether or not to grant Dominion’s final permit.

We started the day by helping the Clinch Coalition build a trail in Jefferson National Forest. The forest is a glorious example of the Appalachian eco-diversity. Hickory, Red Oak and Beech gave way to rhododendron and hemlock. Hemlock is rare these days because of a small beetle, the woolly adelgid, which has infested large numbers of hemlock stands in Virginia. But these hemlock were free from infestation, as was the forest in general. There are few invasive species there, even though the roads and more populated trails have numerous examples of invasives like kudzu. The rhododendrons were still in bloom, and as we looked out over the vista of mountains and deep forest, the scars from mountain top removal mining were clearly in view.

A quarter of this county has been destroyed by mountain top removal mining. We visited black mountain with Larry Bush, whose family has been living there for generations, and we witnessed the intense scarring that mountain top removal mining cuts into this landscape. Miles of land, where a mountain once stood, was leveled, barren and destroyed. Continue reading

Governor Kaine to Air Board: "You know what to do."

Governor Kaine has some friendly advice for the Air Board. Apparently there have been “recent reports” to the Governor necessitating that he reiterate the “obvious parameters within which to exercise [their] authority.” This is just a little FYI, in-case-you-forgot, heads-up-on that-little-meeting coming up, right? Perhaps. Or it’s oblique intimidation, an attempt to rhetorically undercut the independence of the board by declaring his superior knowledge of the regulatory structure of the board.

And of course while the letter does not explicitly reference the Wise County plant, the close proximity to the date of the board’s vote makes its regulatory referent clear enough.

Gov. Kaine seeks to make it clear in the letter that his knowledge of the proper role and regulatory structure of the Air Board is greater than that of the board members themselves. He’ll go ahead and let the board members work from the reasonable assumption that a person (nay, a Governor!) with his knowledge of the functioning of a regulatory body should be able to predict the actions of said regulatory body with a high degree of accuracy. It follows that if the members of the board are to believe Governor Kaine does in fact understand the structure and role of the Air Board as well as he claims he does, then the decision he anticipates should be the correct one. The Governor wants to make it clear to the Air Board that they should get in line with his decision, and if they don’t they are incompetent regulators.

But surely Governor Kaine is aware that the mercury emissions alone from the Wise County plan (not to mention the C02) merit the denial of the Air Permit under the Clean Air Act. Mercury is particularly dangerous to pregnant women and young children. Mercury exposure has been linked to autism, poor attention and language skills, and other developmental problem, prompting the EPA to regulate the toxin. Dominion must meet a standard of 1.1 pounds of emissions per year, but the Wise County plant is in gross violation of this rule and will emit 72 pounds per year.

The board should stick to their guns and not let Governor Kaine intimidate them. Continue reading

Last Chance to Stop Dominion's permits

weekend in wiseCCAN and our partners are organizing a couple days of activities on June 23-24 in Wise County around the next Air Board meeting. Folks from all across Virginia will be coming down to show their support for clean air in Wise County and to testify against Dominion’s proposed coal-burning plant. This is HUGE. It’s the final permit between Dominion and their no-good, dirty scoundrel of a coal-fired power plant.

The power is in the hands of the bureaucracy right now. As a citizen’s board, the Air Board has the power to reject Dominion’s permit and stop construction. They could also stall on the permit because the board is not currently at full capacity