The "Gas Plant" is on the agenda again, Monday Feb. 10, 10 a.m., Giddings City Council Chambers.
This time, instead of our resolution, the Court will consider their substitute resolution. You might want to compare it to our good-faith Jan 28 resolution that we offered as a compromise to our original resolution debated on Dec. 16.
Our objective has always been to have our County government stand up and support us, as they have done for other ill-advised commercial or industrial projects looking to locate in Lee County.
Here’s where we stand as of February 8 – this could change so check back before Monday, Feb. 10.
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The Commissioners Court did not adopt -- but didn't reject -- our proposed resolution on Dec. 16. They tabled the matter in favor of another meeting with us to reach a compromise.
Judge Frank Malinak III and Commissioner Alan Turner finally met with us (Travis Brown, Kourtney Jirasek and Michele Gangnes) on January 28.
In a good faith attempt to reach a compromise, we presented them with a MTGP revised resolution and three maps we developed (our thanks to our map wizard, Andy Wier of SAWDF). The maps depicted three other suitable locations for the gas plant in Lee County and within Sandow Lakes Ranch. The maps were formatted exactly as SLE’s map of the Blue location in its TCEQ application, for an easy comparison and showing the distance from the gas fuel pipeline, the fewer surrounding homes, and the absence of any nearby church or school.
The County had no counter-proposal, so we put the ball in their court.
We believe we acted in good faith on everything asked of us after Dec. 16 and before the Jan. 28 meeting --- we gave up on arguing about whether deed restrictions prevented locating the plant at Alcoa’s old industrial site (although our research leads us to believe the Court was misled about the scope of any deed restrictions). Instead, we agreed to consider alternative sites in Lee County because, make no mistake, the bottom line for the Court is the tax revenue from the plant.
We also were prepared to defer our requested resolution that SLE should abandon the project if it is not relocated, though we asked for that in our Jan. 28 resolution.
We were not asked to, and did not agree to remove our call in the revised resolution for the Court to explicitly oppose locating the plant in the Blue Community – the very reason we asked for the resolution of support from the County in the first place.
We continue to believe that any resolution short of explicit opposition to the Blue site is not in the best interests of those who stand to lose the most.
We asked that the Judge and Alan get back to us with any response so we could get the resolution on the Feb. 10 agenda, but we heard nothing until we were notified by text the evening of Feb. 6 that the “resolution” would be on the Feb. 10 agenda --- nothing was said about a substitute resolution until we received a copy of it the afternoon of Friday, Feb. 8.
We have now responded to the Judge, Mr. Turner and Mr. Placke that we have one major objection to supporting the substitute resolution --- the County’s resolution does not specifically object to or oppose the location of the plant in Blue:
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that the Commissioner's Court hereby recognizes the economic and infrastructure benefits that the Sandow Lakes Energy natural gas power plant will bring to the County, but requests Sandow Lakes Energy to consider economically feasible alternative locations within Sandow Lakes Ranch but within Lee County for its proposed natural gas power plant.
MTGP’s response on Feb. 8 offered the following single resolution instead of the above:
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that the Commissioner's Court hereby opposes the location of Sandow Lakes Energy’s proposed natural gas power plant in the Blue/Adina community in favor of an alternative suitable, feasible and less populated location within the Sandow Lakes Ranch property in Lee County.