Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, November 18, 1994 TAG: 9411180109
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CATHRYN McCUE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NARROWS LENGTH: Long
She acknowledged the delay after meeting with power line foes, who chastised the forest for leaving out churches, public springs and other resources on maps of alternative routes, and for leaving out the public in preparing the draft environmental impact statement.
"Nothing I didn't expect," Berg said after the courteous, but contentious, session. "It's a long, hard, complicated process. ... There'll be a lot of confusion."
The Feb. 28 deadline will be pushed back so the forest can review more information and requests from other agencies to expand the study area, Berg said. She said she could not pin down a new due date.
The delay will allow her agency to consider a request from the West Virginia Public Service Commission to include other routes to the south. This could bring the proposed line into Tazewell County, previously untouched by the controversy.
Such a route could mesh with one favored by the National Park Service, which oversees the Appalachian Trail. The park service is asking its sister agency to consider a route that crosses the trail where it meets Interstate 77.
"The fact that it's going to be delayed further doesn't surprise me much, given the past history of the U.S. Forest Service," said Apco Vice President Charles Simmons, reached by phone later in the day.
Apco wants to build a 116-mile, 765,000-volt line from West Virginia into Virginia, crossing forest land. Jefferson forest officials, whose approval is needed to build the line, has postponed issuing the environmental draft several times in two years.
Earlier this year, Simmons met with Berg's boss, Gloria Manning, regional deputy forester, to complain about the delays.
Feeling slighted, the opponents called for a similar face-to-face with Manning. In a rare move for someone in her position, Manning flew in Thursday from Atlanta to meet with about 30 people at Anna's Restaurant in this Giles County town. Apco executives were not invited.
"I'm not here to answer any questions," Manning said right off. She came to listen, and listen she did - for three hours.
"Our people do not understand those maps," said Ellen Coleman, a power line opponent from Craig County, pointing to the half-dozen maps taped to the walls. The color-coded maps show routes for the power line drawn by the forest as alternatives to Apco's preferred location.
Coleman said there are no landmarks for residents to find their property in relation to the proposals.
The maps are even more seriously flawed than that, others said. Howdy Henritz owns a spring water bottling company in West Virginia that has won international taste awards. He has written letters and met with forest officials to make sure they knew exactly where his spring and others were situated.
"It's like we literally gave them the coordinates to run right over them. It's bizarre," he said. Three springs, two of them public drinking supplies for West Virginia communities, are smack in the middle of one of the corridors, and are marked erroneously as caves, he said. His doesn't even turn up on the map.
That's not the only resource that was overlooked and wound up in "the dreaded blue zones," said David Brady, a Giles County opponent. (The forest used a color-coded scoring system to rank environmental impacts from the 765-kv line, the largest size of transmission lines. Blue areas received the lowest scores, meaning they were most suitable for the line.)
Brady said the forest's alternative routes run over three covered bridges in the county, one of them a historic landmark; the Newport Agricultural Fairgrounds; an Indian burial ground; and black cemeteries. They also cross prime agricultural land, environmentally sensitive karst terrain, and the Saltville fault.
"It's important to note," Brady continued, "that we're sitting in one of the corridors now. Try to imagine Anna's Restaurant as a 200-foot right of way."
Another longtime opponent is Jim McNeely, a West Virginia lawyer, who ripped apart the forest's scoring system. Handing a bundle of maps to Manning, he noted that Stony Creek in the Jefferson National Forest, an area "riddled with roads" and destined for logging, received the same score as Pipestem Resort State Park, "the flagship of parks in the state of West Virginia."
And whereas the Bluestone Wildlife Management area got 92 points, McNeely said, a quarter-mile of unfragmented woods on forest land got 1,840. Some spots were left blank and also ended up in the corridors, he said.
Berg later told a reporter she would commit to reviewing the scoring system, although she would not promise to change it.
Doug Palmer, representing the Hinton, W.Va.-based New River Parkway Authority, said the group opposed the power line because it would cross their proposed two-lane scenic road.
"The [environmental impact statement] should not be used to justify a decision that was already made," he said.
Many residents told Manning they felt the Jefferson's information was too little, and came way too late. The forest first sought public comment on the power line in the "scoping" process about two years ago. The only route on paper then was Apco's preferred route, so folks who weren't directly affected didn't respond, Brady said.
The Jefferson released its maze of alternative routes, extending many miles north and south of the original, in July, catching hundreds of people by surprise, he said.
"How is this environmental justice?" he asked. "Every one of those alternatives is a real, living, breathing alternative that could go over someone's house."
At the end of the meeting, Manning said that she has only oversight of the way the Jefferson is preparing the environmental report, not what the report says or concludes.
She patted the six-inch stack of documents handed her by opponents and said: "I was going to ask you to indulge. It's going to take some time to get through all this."
by CNB