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Washington, D.C. - In its zeal to protect us, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency might inadvertently cost scores of jobs in Greater Cincinnati and affect the quality of education for about 2,500 students.
New regulations have prompted Duke Energy to announce it will pull the plug on the part of the Beckjord power plant in Clermont County that relies on coal-fired generators to produce electricity.
The EPA thinks the plant will cause more air pollution than allowed by agency rules that take effect in 2015. Duke Energy couldn’t justify investing hundreds of millions of dollars to bring the 60-year-old power plant into compliance with the new standards.
Duke also plans to close one of its units at the Miami Fort generating plant in Hamilton County, which provides electricity to Kentucky. Again, the reason is it would cost too much to upgrade that plant near North Bend to comply with the new EPA standards.
It makes more economic sense for Duke to buy electricity on the wholesale market and resell it to local customers. It’s too soon to say whether customers will see increases in utility bills, a Duke spokeswoman told me.
Four oil-fired generators at the Clermont County plant, which is in New Richmond and Pierce Township, could continue to operate past the deadline.
But the net effect will be to export an important part of Clermont County’s tax base to wherever Duke Energy has to go to buy electricity. This is not something that we need.
Closing part of Beckjord will cause harm to the community. The plant employs about 120 people. Duke will try to redeploy as many workers as possible to other sites, the company spokeswoman told me.
The fate of teachers, police officers and firefighters/paramedics whose salaries depend on Duke taxes is unclear, but layoffs are possible.
Estimates indicate Pierce Township could lose more than $766,000 annually, I was told by a township official. New Richmond, which has about 2,400 residents, could lose about $350,000 annually – not counting the income taxes now paid by Duke workers, a village official told me.
The New Richmond School District, which employs about 350 full-time workers and 150 part-timers, could lose about $2 million annually – nearly 10 percent of its operating budget, I was told by a school official. The district serves about 2,500 children from the villages of New Richmond and Moscow and the townships of Pierce, Monroe, Ohio and Washington.
For people in Washington, D.C., where trillions of dollars are tossed around these days, $2 million doesn’t get the kind of respect it used to command. But to residents of Southwest Ohio, it still looks like a fortune.
The people who end up paying for the revenue lost because of the EPA’s regulations will be the students whose schools are not as well equipped as they should be, the teachers who lose jobs or are not paid what they deserve, and the parents who have to dig deeper into their pockets to cover tax increases that these localities could be prompted to seek.
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