A contentious hearing Thursday night to guide official scrutiny of a proposed Tideflats methanol plant drew hundreds more people than a 400-seat meeting room in the Greater Tacoma Convention & Trade Center could hold, leaving city officials pondering Friday how to handle future hearings.
“We are going to fix this next time,” said Ian Munce, the city’s principal planner and manager of the methanol project. “We are going to the ballroom next time.”
The meeting room used for Thursday’s event, instead of the 1,200-capacity ballroom, resulted in a meeting that started an hour ahead of schedule, after all seats were filled and the room’s perimeter was lined by the project’s advocates and detractors jammed together into close proximity.
The hearing was the first public meeting since the Port of Tacoma agreed in 2014 on a 30-year lease of waterfront property to build the 125-acre methanol production facility, which would be the world’s largest.The project’s proposer, Northwest Innovation Works, draws financial support from China’s government and BP (the British petroleum company), and also plans to build two similar plants in Kalama and the Port of St. Helens in Clatskanie, Oregon.
Several cited troubling problematic consequences of Tacoma’s industrial past, including the much-mocked “Tacoma aroma” and the lead and arsenic that fell from the Asarco copper smelter smokestack into Tacoma’s soils for much of the 20th century.
“Yes, we need jobs,” said Bruce Hoeft, a retired teacher who lives in Tacoma, “but we need ones that will not threaten the health of the people who have those jobs and the people who live nearby. … The smelter also provided those jobs, and it poisoned the land and the water.”
Enormous Northwest refineries would feed China exclusively
City of Tacomahas the links to Scoping and the comment portal. There will be a second hearing Tuesday, February 16, 2016, 6:30 PM, at Meeker Middle School, 4402 Nassau Avenue NE.
The plot thickens over Capt. Kirk and his plan to save California from its drought.
Actor William Shatner suggested recently that a pipeline from, say, Seattle to California just might do the trick for the parched Golden State.
"So I'm starting a Kickstarter campaign. I want $30 billion ... to build a pipeline like the Alaska pipeline. Say, from Seattle — a place where there's a lot of water. There's too much water. How bad would it be to get a large, 4-foot pipeline, keep it above ground — because if it leaks, you're irrigating!" Shatner told Yahoo's David Pogue.
And then it got weird:
Lt Gaia teleported to Aberdeen today and filed this report with the Starship Enterprise:
California's been getting all the attention, but it isn't the only agriculture-centric western state dealing with brutal drought. Washington, a major producer of wheat and wine grapes and the source of nearly 70 percent of US apples grown for fresh consumption, also endured an usually warm and snow-bereft winter.The state's Department of Ecology has declared "drought emergencies" in 24 of the state's 62 watersheds, an area comprising 44 percent of the state.
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