Alexandria city officials are poised to decide today whether to approve a settlement with the Mirant Corp. after a seven-year-long battle over pollution control measures at the company’s Potomac River Generating Plant.
Under the settlement, the company would be allowed to merge five smokestacks into two and operate three boilers instead of five but would have to commit $34 million for pollution control upgrades at the coal-fired plant.
Officials would determine which upgrades to implement after reviewing options recommended by an engineering study, but the measures would be capped at $34 million.
“There’s going to be uncertainty with this deal if it goes through and there would be uncertainty without it,” said Bill Skraback, Alexandria Department of Transportation and Environmental Quality chief. “We feel that there are sufficient benefits in this proposal that we’re presenting it to the city.”
The proposed agreement comes on the heels of a March ruling by a state panel that the company must regulate the release of a type of emissions believed to be particularly dangerous.
Those emissions are at the heart of the dispute between the city and the company, with the city fighting to prevent the state from issuing Mirant a permit to merge its smokestacks without compelling the company to increase its pollution controls.
Mirant officials have said merging the company’s smokestacks would help the environment because the emissions would move faster, shoot higher in the air and disperse better.
“It’s not that we fought the merger in and of itself,” Skraback said. “Dispersing the pollution better is a good thing as long as there are control measures along with it.”
The deal is a net benefit for the city, Skraback said, because the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has indicated that stack mergers could qualify companies such as Mirant for “dispersion credits” that would automatically allow them to operate more boilers.
“I would say that the staff’s consensus is that this is a good deal for the city,” City Attorney Ignacio Pessoa said.
A Mirant spokesman did not immediately return phone messages requesting comment.
