There is a power plant in Old Town Alexandria, the old port city nestled along the Potomac River just south of Washington. It was built by the Potomac Electric Power Company (Pepco) in 1949, at the north end of town, hard on the bank of the river. Back then, the neighborhood was industrial and decidedly low-rent.
When deregulation hit the energy market, the plant passed eventually to a company called Mirant. I moved to Old Town, just across the street from Mirant, in 2001. The power plant has never bothered me. Truth be told, I kind of like it. For one thing, it’s useful: The plant generates 482 megawatts–enough to power between 400,000 and 500,000 homes. It employs some 178 people. It’s unobtrusive and mostly hidden from view by trees. The only time I really notice it is when the train rolls by to deliver coal, and I’ve always been partial to trains.
The rest of Old Town feels somewhat differently.
In recent years, Old Town has undergone a demographic transformation. No longer a mixed socioeconomic bag, it’s now one of the richest and most exclusive Washington suburbs. Almost all of the former industrial sites and lower-income residences have been bulldozed to make way for expensive shops, luxury townhouses, and condominiums. In 2006, the median home sales price in Old Town was $696,000.
Alexandria has been politically transmogrified by this infusion of wealth. For instance, while Virginia went for Bush 54 percent to 45 percent in 2004, Alexandria went for Kerry 67 percent to 32 percent. The city now boasts its own Human Rights Commission and recently appointed its first poet laureate, a former chemistry teacher named Mary McElveen. A sample from her “City of Songs”: We are tomorrow’s unwritten poems: / Homeless and builder, / Tourist and truck driver, / Lawyer and artist–all of us / Speaking our souls to cellphones / And singing to the empty air.
One of the songs I hear a lot these days is how much Alexandrians hate Mirant. After a half century of good relations, the city decided in 2000–just as property values began to soar, incidentally–that Mirant was a menace. In a fit of Get Out of My Backyard–GOMBY–ism, the city now wants it banished. The job of producing power would then be shoehorned into somebody else’s neighborhood.
The GOMBY campaign began with residents requesting that Mirant perform a “dust study” to see if the plant was contaminating the air. Mirant obliged; research showed it wasn’t. The city then focused on the plant’s Nitrogen Oxides emissions, charging that they were too high. In 2003, Mirant entered into a consent decree to control and monitor NOx with the Department of Energy, the EPA, and the state of Virginia. Alexandria challenged this deal in court. It lost. Next, the city argued that “downwash” was affecting the high-rise condominiums next to the plant. Incidentally, this complex, erected in the 1970s, was built on land once owned by Pepco. It seems a little unfair to acquire land, build on it, and then claim that you want the government to evict the former owner, who still lives next door.
Nonetheless, Mirant devised a system to alleviate the downwash issue using a compound called trona. Egged on by citizen groups, the city then objected to the use of trona.
You might think there was nothing Mirant could do to satisfy Old Town’s new elites. Which is what the city’s director of transportation and environmental services admitted during a 2006 deposition. Asked if there was any way the plant could be operated so as not to be a nuisance, he said no, there wasn’t.
Alexandria has filed three lawsuits against Mirant. It’s lost all three, while spending some $2 million of taxpayer money. It has thrown away other money too. Like any smart corporation, Mirant spreads around cash to foster goodwill, giving to local causes, charities, and scholarships. One of the company’s annual gifts is for $1,000 to help with the city’s Earth Day cele brations. This year, for the first time, the city returned Mirant’s check.
That money could have been spent on schools or poets. And what about the children?
Perhaps this all makes me, as one anti-Mirant neighbor gently put it, “a traitor to my class.” It certainly makes me a hypocrite. I knew Alexandria was like this when I moved here. Yet I still can’t help but wish that the anti-Mirant busybodies would leave my little power plant alone and move somewhere else.
JONATHAN V. LAST
