The culmination of eight months and hundreds of hours of often heated debate came to a head at Tuesday’s City Council meeting when all but one councilman refused to pass a resolution opposing plans for a new AES power plant.
The council majority did reiterate its intentions to be an “intervener” in AES’ repowering application process with the California Energy Commission, an attempt to reassure the community that the city’s best interests would be served in the repowering process.
The battle lines have been drawn. A week earlier, on July 3, the citizen’s group Building a Better Redondo officially filed its intent to circulate petitions for a ballot initiative that would propose rezoning the AES site for only parkland and commercial uses, thereby ending power generation and other industrial uses at the 52-acre waterfront area that has been home to a power plant for a century.
At Tuesday’s meeting, Councilmen Pat Aust and Steve Aspel both said BBR’s action forced their opposition to the resolution. Mayor Mike Gin, who also opposed the resolution, voiced concern about the BBR initiative’s potential to draw the city into a litigation quagmire.
“Should this initiative qualify and pass it puts the city in a really bad place in terms of legal liability,” Gin said. “I just don’t think its right, and I have a real problem with that. This may start to go through some circulation, and if someone stops you at Whole Foods or Vons or whatever I encourage you to read the thing and encourage you not to sign it.”
Both Aust and Aspel previously stated they would not vote to oppose the repowering if the initiative was in play, and they made good on their promise Tuesday night.
“We made a great decision,” said Aspel in an interview following the meeting. “It’s one man’s crusade against AES, it’s not an entire city’s thought. Now they can go through the initiative process as I know they will and let the voters decide what to do.”
Councilman Bill Brand, a BBR advocate, was the lone voice on the dais in favor of the resolution. Brand expressed shock at the number of people who came out in support of AES, something he attributed to AES’s mass mailing of a “fact booklet” regarding the future of the power plant. Brand said the booklet was misleading.
“They were uneducated,” said Brand. “They still thought we needed the power. They obviously haven’t come to previous meetings and they don’t care about the increase in air pollution.”
Aspel, on the other hand, thought their testimony was courageous.
“They weren’t speaking against the power plant as much as they came out and spoke against BBR,” said Aspel.
Jennifer Didlo, the project director of the Southland Repower Team for AES, said the company’s openness to compromise would have been dealt a blow if the council passed a resolution opposing its repowering.
“I think it would be good for them to take a position that supports working together and ensuring that the existing power plant gets removed,” Didlo said in an interview prior to the meeting. “The way to do that is to build a much smaller [power plant] in a back corner.”
Gin has been a proponent of compromise from the beginning and urged the council to keep those doors open. But Brand said the time for compromise is past.
“The citizen initiative process is all that is left to stop a new power plant from going up in Redondo Beach,” said Brand. “The council’s inaction played right into the hands of AES, and is a green light for all the regulatory agencies to approve a new power plant here.” ER
