ACC — one city’s loss could be another’s gain

Armchair Mayor column for The Kamloops Daily News, Saturday, June 12, 2010

Maybe the Aboriginal Cogeneration Corp. story will have a happy ending.

As reported in this newspaper earlier in the week, a group of Prince George business people are wooing the company Kamloops didn’t want. After this city removed the welcome mat, ACC president Kim Sigurdson received a call.

The message: if Kamloops doesn’t want you, come on up to the friendly north country.

How serious are they, and Sigurdson, about the prospects of an ACC gasification plant in Prince? Very.

“I’m working hard with them,” Sigurdson told me. “Prince George is Number One on the list.”

Oh, are there others?

Well, yes. Terrace and the District of Mackenzie have called, as well.

It isn’t just about railway ties, Sigurdson said — his gasification technology is of interest to those who want to use “clean stock” like beetle wood or waste lumber, as well.

“Prince George is a great place to look at because of the pine-beetle-damaged wood and other fuel, and, of course, the railway ties. They’ve been talking to us about different locations.”

In fact, Sigurdson was set to introduce his technology at the fourth annual International Bio-Energy Conference and Exhibition in Prince George this week, but he’s recovering from an illness and couldn’t make it. Billed as the biggest bio-energy conference in Canada, it attracts speakers from all over the world.

A small detail would have to be worked out — Sigurdson’s contract for sourcing railway ties is with CP Rail, which doesn’t run through Prince George. He doesn’t see that as a problem, though he wouldn’t go on the record about prospects for doing a deal with CN or B.C. Rail, or whether shipping CP Rail ties north would be viable.

What, I asked him, would he do differently this time? “The process that we went through (in Kamloops) was a comedy of errors and I can take a lot of the blame for that,” he said. “If I was to do it all over again, I wouldn’t dismiss a small group of people. People around me said ‘don’t worry about it’ and I should have worried about it.”

This time, he says, “I would be up there making myself available to the public. I’m not going to make the same mistakes twice.”

Sigurdson expects some pushback from the public in Prince George, though it’s hard to say whether it will be anything like what happened in Kamloops. If anyone has a feel for public opinion in Prince, it’s radio talk jock and blogger Ben Meisner, one of the better known voices in the province.

As soon as he read The Daily News story reprinted in The Prince George Citizen, Meisner wrote a commentary for his Opinion 250 blog questioning the authority of the Prince George Downtown Business Improvement Association to speak for the community on the issue, and immediately got a few comments similar to the old creosote paranoia we went through here.

“There has to be some waste product from the process, and I’ll bet it is concentrated and toxic,” wrote one. “If (BIA president) Hughy Nicholson will volunteer to unload a flat car load of creosoted railroad ties with his bare hands, I will endorse his request,” wrote another. “If not, forget his idea.”

But Meisner says he isn’t necessarily against ACC, and figures the overall reaction in P.G. would be quite different from Kamloops.

“It may be a really nice fit,” he told me. “It will be looked at; it won’t be one of those things where ‘we’ve got to kill it and get it out.’ They’ll get a good reception.

“No question about it, they’ll be given a fair hearing.”

His shots at the BIA have to do both with recently elected BIA president Nicholson — publisher of the Citizen and frequent subject of Meisner’s blogs — and with what he sees as a sort of boosterism that could backfire. Declaring that P.G. wants the project this early in the game does ACC no favours, he says.

Meanwhile, all seems in order for September’s Environmental Appeal Board hearing of ACC’s permit in Kamloops, but the big question is whether Ruth Madsen will meet her August deadline for filing the thousands of pages of argument she says she’ll be putting before the board.

With ACC clearly out of the Kamloops picture, is there really much value in pursuing the appeal? Will the fight be carried to P.G.? Interesting to note Madsen’s involvement in the Fraser Basin Council, a supposedly neutral organization that has taken a sudden interest in what’s going on with ACC in Prince George.

BY THE WAY: Both Meisner and our own Claude Richmond are recent appointments to the Law Society of B.C. governing board. When I asked Meisner if he had an honorary university doctorate to match Richmond’s he said no, but he did turn down an Order of B.C. .

mrothenburger@kamloopsnews.ca

http://www.armchairmayor.wordpress.com