BY SARA PITZER
SALISBURY POST

About 200 people gathered at West Rowan Middle School Tuesday night to learn more about Carolina Power & Light’s proposed natural gas-fueled electric generating plant near Cleveland. The people started coming before 6 p.m., even though the meeting wasn’t scheduled until 6:30.

CP&L set up the event like a Southern drop-in – come when you can, stay as long as you like. Most people stayed until the official end at 8:30.

The crowd was heavily dotted with CP&L representatives. They wore tiny gold CP&L pins like fraternity pins.

Local officials, county commissioners and members of the Salisbury-Rowan Economic Development Commission were out in force, too.

Even Barry Powlas, one of the heirs selling the land for the proposed site, came. ‘‘We are glad this industry decided to buy. It’s good and clean,’’ he said. Things would’ve been worse if the state had wanted the land for a dump.’’

The gathering had the air of a low-key party, fellowship hour after church or refreshments at the end of a Parent Teacher Association meeting. Some people ate chocolate chip cookies purported to be homemade. Others ate handfuls of peanuts, washed them down with soda and dusted away the salt before shaking hands.

While some folks were moving from one informational display to the next, others quizzed CP&L’s experts.

Jerry Letchworth, in charge of project planning and siting, said he was getting a lot of ‘‘professional questions’’ about the height of the buildings, how often the generators would run, now much water they would use, whether or not the plant would be an eyesore.

‘‘The highest building will only be 100 feet,’’ he said. The plant will sit in the middle of 360 acres. The property is already well screened by woodland on three sides and the company plans to reforest the area next to Parks Road that has been clearcut.

Newly planted trees take a while to grow. He smiled and said, ‘‘It takes a while to build a plant. It will take two years to build the plant.’’

As for sound, Letchworth said the state set limits for industry at 75 decibels daytime, 65 decibels at night, measured at the boundary. This plant will not exceed 60 decibels at the boundary any time, he said.

A chart compared sound values at 60 decibels to normal speech at three feet. At 70 decibels the sound would be about like a vacuum cleaner at one foot.

People responded to the information according to how close they live to the proposed site.

Rosa Myers lives on Godbey Road, about two miles away ‘‘as the crow flies.’’ She said she hasn’t decided yet what she thinks of the project. ‘‘Something worse could come in there, like waste treatment,’’ she said. ‘‘It’s kind of hard to say. But they’ve been real nice.’’

Jim Horton lives on Statesville Boulevard. He came to the meeting because he was interested in property for a home near the site and this doesn’t change it, he said. ‘‘I am happy with it. It’s better than the smelly asphalt plant I live near. I’d rather live near this,’’ he said.

Charles Barber of Cleveland came to the meeting just to see what is going on. ‘‘I’m all for it. It’s good for the area,’’ he said. ‘‘If someone is against it let’s see what happens when he runs out of power in the middle of the summer. This is better than hazardous waste.’’

Ken Nelson wasn’t quite so pleased. In October he started building his own house. ‘‘I built in the country because I wanted peace and quiet,’’ he said. He is about two months from finishing his house and doesn’t think it will be exactly peaceful and quiet. ‘‘But it’s progress. What are you going to do?’’

But some people clustered in the hall on their way out of the school had plenty of objections. The gist was that county commissioners are sacrificing their best interests to bring a large, taxable operation to the county.

Jean and Harry Dixon live about a mile and a half from where the plant would sit. Harry said he had planned to live there the rest of his life but if the plant expanded he might not be able to. Jean wished CP&L had held a meeting where people could sit and ask questions because someone else might think of a question that hadn’t occurred to her. ‘‘If they say you might hear it, you’re going to hear it,’’ she said.

She said when she tried to raise her objections to commissioners, ‘‘a redheaded commissioner’’ told her, ‘‘If you don’t like it, move.’’

The Dixons said they didn’t know the area was industrial when the moved into it 10 years ago. ‘‘We thought we were moving into the country,’’ Harry said.

Bette Coulter lives on N.C. 801. She’s worried about a lot of things: losing the quiet of her neighborhood, dangerous fuel truck traffic on the highway, pollution when the plant uses oil rather than gas. ‘‘Policy makers never considered the people in the community,’’ she said.

She said she’d been unable to build a house on land nearby because it wouldn’t perk. She wondered how a plant could be built if the property doesn’t perk. ‘‘If tax money is coming in, it will perk,’’ she said.

Jennifer Morris Young was the most upset of the group. She lives on Parks Road and says the plant ‘‘is literally our neighbor.’’ She said the CP&L representatives had compared the noise the CP&L plant would make to conversation in a room. Young has a young son and a baby on the way. She wanted them to be able to play outside while she worked in the house or sat on the porch. ‘‘As loud as it (conversation) was in there, I couldn’t hear them,’’ she said. Tears welled from her eyes. ‘‘I won’t be able to hear my children’s laughter.’’

Beth Morris, who lives directly across the road, handed her tissues. Morris, who has two children under 2, shares Young’s worry.

Bonnie Cobb also lives in the area. She said the plant should be built ‘‘as if a county commissioner adjoins it.’’

CP&L vans will take anyone who wants to see and hear the plant in Darlington for a plant tour Saturday. CP&L officials say the plant is similar but not identical to the one proposed for the Cleveland site.

Young isn’t going. She said she wouldn’t learn anything there because they were going to turn on only one generator and that wouldn’t tell her anything about how five might sound in her back yard.

Back in the meeting room, Reginald Keith, of Hoover and Keith, tried to explain how to evaluate the sound. He said it takes an increase of 10 decibels to make a sound seem twice as loud as it was. With the difference, the proposed plant will sound somewhat less than twice as loud as the one in Darlington, he said. It won’t be as quiet as a farm valley, at 20 decibels, he said, but ‘‘a lot of people play in back yards’’ where the sound is at 60 or more decibels.

And Mike Hughes, spokesperson for CP&L, explained the fuel issue this way: CP&L will have tanks for number 2 fuel oil on the property for times when the supply of gas is curtailed. Oil would never be used entirely as an economy because if gas became expensive, oil would too. Industrial emissions are regulated by the state. The permit would set a cap for acceptable emissions before plant construction begins and the company would have to stop using oil before they exceeded the permitted emissions. The permit would not be amended.

Young and her friends were not consoled by the explanations but they agreed, ‘‘CP&L has been nice to us. They are trying to be a good neighbor.’’