OBERLIN — City officials said the real work started Wednesday after City Council voted 4 to 3 the night before to back out of taking part in a proposed $2.9 billion coal-fired plant on the Ohio River.

The slim Council majority was not willing to go along with a 50-year commitment to buy coal-fired electricity from American Municipal Power-Ohio (AMP-Ohio), Council President David Sonner said.

The decision came after about four hours of discussion by an overflow crowd.

“It was a prolonged exercise of democracy,” Sonner said. “There’s a sense of exhilaration we’re not only doing the right thing, but the best thing economically.”

Voting to pull out of the coal-fired plant were Sonner, Council Vice President Jack Baumann and Councilmen David Ashenhurst and Charles Peterson.

AMP-Ohio spokesman Kent Carson said the company was disappointed with Oberlin’s decision.

“We feel they’re leaving themselves vulnerable to the open market,” Carson said.

But Andrew Wetzler, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Ohio Field Office, said signing on to a coal plant now is “like buying a Hummer with $4 prices at the pump.”

“With cleaner forms of energy becoming more technologically and economically available by the day, it makes no sense for a community to lock into 19th century coal for the next two generations,” Wetzler said.

The three Council members who wanted to stay in the AMP-Ohio project were Sharon Soucy, Scott Broadwell and Ronnie Rimbert.

Soucy, who described herself as “an intense environmentalist,” said the clean-coal technology of the new plant would have been preferable to buying electricity on the open market from older coal-fired plants.

Now that the decision has been made, Sonner said he expects all seven Council members to work hard to find alternatives.

Sonner said officials from the city and Oberlin College will travel to Kent State University to examine a natural gas-fired turbine that produces about 90 percent of KSU’s electrical needs in the winter and 60 percent in the summer.

Oberlin has a five-year window to explore options because it will continue to get power from the old coal-fired Gorsuch plant on the Ohio River. 

Businesses, meanwhile, are hoping for the best.

Dave Kaltenbach, owner of the IGA, said “I’m not 100 percent sure about the right way to go.”

A small increase in power rates will not jeopardize his business, he said, and he noted that at least for now, most power needs in the Midwest are being met by coal or nuclear power.

Contact Cindy Leise at 653-6250 or cleise@chroniclet.com.

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