Rep. Gardner Asked Questions, Promised Delays

BY MARK WINEKA
SALISBURY POST

When nearby residents decided to fight the location of a new Carolina Power & Light plant on Gheen Road, they turned to someone they guessed might be their ally: state Rep. Charlotte Gardner.

They were right. Gardner was one of them - a neighbor with as many questions about CP&L's $250 million electric plant as they had.

"Since I live out here, they thought I could be of some help," Gardner said this morning. She lives in St. John's Woods, a new development across U.S. 601 from Plantation Ridge, where much of the opposition originated.

Gardner learned that CP&L had withdrawn its rezoning request Tuesday afternoon.

Through much of December, she had been trying to set up a meeting with CP&L lobbyist Gene Upchurch and the company's attorney. Her own busy December schedule has included several out-of-state, fact-finding trips to mental hospitals.

"All of this coming at Christmas is a time when it's harder to get things done of this nature," Gardner said. "I was going to try and set up a meeting with their lobbyist and go over a lot of the concerns and questions raised by the residents.

"Certainly, I wanted to get all the information I could, but there were concerns that I thought weren't addressed."

She learned that CP&L couldn't show her a prototype of the plant it wanted to build in Rowan County. She wanted to see a prototype and, like her neighbors, worried that the only way she could be persuaded that noise and buffering would be addressed was to see the actual plant in place.

Gardner also questioned CP&L's suggestion that the plant often would be idle - operating only at peak demands. With growing competition among energy companies and the ability of plants to supply power to other regions of the country, Gardner guessed that a Rowan County plant might be busy all the time.

"I came to believe that it just wasn't something to be used only at peak times," Gardner said. "In the new deregulation era, peak-time energy is going to be everywhere all over the country."

CP&L's intentions to build a Rowan County plant, even though Rowan isn't in its regular service area, also suggested to Gardner that the plant would be busy supplying power elsewhere.

Despite all the scheduling conflicts, Gardner said, Upchurch and the CP&L attorney were eager to meet with her. She hoped that a meeting would help the residents assess where they should go next.

Upchurch called her Tuesday with the utility's decision to withdraw. The lobbyist told Gardner the company needed to move quickly on a site and were not prepared to deal with the delays that seemed imminent at the Gheen Road location.

"Folks out here got a good Christmas gift with this announcement," Gardner said from her home this morning.