Letters to the Editor
On the Hospital & FPP
To the Editor:
William Bernsen of Plum’s March 17 letter to the Record exhibits the kind of creative and analytical and independent thinking that has been lacking with respect to keeping Fayette County’s hospital fully operational. His recommendations for Fayette County, where generations of my family were born and raised, are to be commended and should be seriously considered by the powers that be. So, I call upon the Fayette County Record to interview and report on the answers of the County Judge and County Attorney and its State Senator as to whether Fayette County has the authority to issue bonds to fund Mr. Bernsen’s proposed solution without the need of a tax increase (and, if not, why not obtain authority from the Texas Legislature to do so?)
In that same vein, while we are on the topic of protecting the health of the people of Fayette County and their beautiful land and precious water, the same could be said for the Record to demand answers as to whether the LCRA has or may obtain authority to issue bonds for the far greater and more serious need to replace the poisonous and increasingly costly 1640 MW coal fired power plant at the Fayette Power Project (FPP) with a 24/7 CAES 1640 MW wind generated electric power plant in West Texas to replace the same amount of electricity that FPP contributes to the grid but without any of FPP’s external costs. That 24/7 CAES 1640 MW wind generated electric power plan could conceptually be operated for 40 years or more at a very small annual operational cost but constructed and fully funded by those bonds at an annual amortized cost over 20 years of no more than FPP’s annual out of state raw coal costs alone, while avoiding almost all of FPP’s huge operating and repair costs and all of its prohibitive external costs. That would enable the LCRA to stop wasting and poisoning the water of the Colorado River and area water wells and generate clean electricity at conceptually less than half of the long-term cost of the dirty aging coal fired power plant at FPP. That would also enable the LCRA to fund from the resulting operating and repair savings and from the greater profits of wind generated electricity the long overdue containment and clean-up of its decades of accumulation of extremely hazardous coal ash waste.
That transition would also allow the LCRA to build planet and health saving mass solar on part of its several thousand acres and return the remaining thousands of acres to the tax rolls of Fayette County that has laid fallow now and not generated any property tax revenue for at least 40 years, and would enable the present and future generations of young people in Fayette County to find land to build a home and start a family in Fayette County instead of being forced to migrate to the big city, with an economic multiplier effect far greater than its coal fired power plant which reportedly spends 200 million of our Texas dollars to out of state coal companies every year and needlessly imposes harsh contractual burdens on electric cooperatives and municipal utilities and consumers. Unfortunately, unlike a privately owned coal fired power plant that would have been decommissioned and cleaned up by now, FPP has been able to hide behind the skirts of governmental immunity and not be accountable for its waste and contamination of water or its decades of unregulated air emission of “ultra-fines” that to this very day causes severe respiratory illnesses and cancer and the early onset of dementia and premature death.
As to the understandable concern for existing Fayette County jobs at FPP, it is way past time that the LCRA commit and communicate to the people of Fayette County its exit strategy for its aging and increasingly costly and increasingly environmentally hazardous coal fired power plant, and its plans and its timeline to train workers at FPP for good paying green energy jobs and for the containment, and clean-up of the toxic substances leaking from its coal ash pits into private water wells and the Colorado River and how, and when the LCRA will fund the costs of that long overdue containment and clean-up and renewable energy transition and the costs of protecting the future livelihoods of its FPP workers.
So, while the Record interviews and reports the answers of the above three members of county and state government about Fayette County’s hospital to protect the health of the people of Fayette County, please also interview and report the answers of not only those three government officials but also the answers of the LCRA’s chief executive officer to the above questions regarding future plans to protect Fayette County workers at FPP and the air and water of Fayette County and the Colorado River, and the future of Fayette County for its younger generations and their health and quality of life.
Remember that our sacred Constitution’s representative democracy and its separation of powers presently threatened by the extreme right wing in our country only serves all of “We, the People” when members of the Fourth Estate like the reporters of the Fayette County Record demand and report on the answers from those in power to these kinds of questions to hold them accountable at the voting booth.