The McKnight Neighborhood Council is the latest community group to come out in opposition to a wood-burning power plant planned for Page Boulevard.
Last week, the McKnight council announced that its board had decided, by unanimous support, to ask the City Council to revoke a special permit granted in 2008 to Palmer Renewable Energy to build the plant. The facility, which is expected to cost about $150 million, would burn wood chips from construction and demolition waste. Proponents of the project, which Palmer Energy says would create 50 jobs, describe it as environmentally sound renewable energy production, one that would prevent waste from ending up in landfills and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
But opponents, organized under the group Stop Toxic Incineration in Springfield, argue that burning construction and demolition waste would release dangerous toxins contained in the wood—including arsenic, lead and mercury—into the air, creating a public health hazard for the entire Valley. STIS is backed by a number of neighborhood groups and environmental and health organizations, among them, the Mass. Medical Society, the American Lung Association and the Pioneer Valley Asthma Coalition.
While the Neighborhood Council’s vote is recent, McKnight’s Youth Council has been working against the project for more than a year. The youth council and other opponents—who insist on calling the project an incinerator, rejecting the benign-sounding term “biomass plant”—have been pressing city councilors to revoke that permit. Over the summer, the group says, they delivered more than 900 postcards to councilors asking them to rescind the permit.
Of the 13 current city councilors, only four were in office in 2008 when the permit was granted; all four—at-large Councilors Jimmy Ferrera, Tim Rooke, Jose Tosado and Kateri Walsh—voted in favor of the permit. STIS is now hoping to change their minds, and to win the support of the remaining councilors, all of whom took office after that vote. Councilors Mel Edwards (Ward 3), John Lysak (Ward 8) and Keith Wright (Ward 6) all attended an August STIS rally; the group also counts Councilors Tim Allen (Ward 7), Zaida Luna (Ward 1), and Henry Twiggs (Ward 4) on their side.
The city Law Department is currently looking into the legality of revoking the permit. Ferrera recently told the Springfield Republican: “Revoking anybody’s special permit is a very sensitive matter. I have not seen the actual legal just cause to revoke somebody’s special permit.”
