“If the newspaper wants to know if I intend to apologize. No. I’m not going to apologize for wanting to know how all this money was spent.”
Monongalia County Commissioner Tom Bloom said as much when asked if he believed the Appalachian Stewardship Foundation was owed an apology after he publicly questioned how the group dispersed $2.2 million in grants funded by Longview Power per a 2004 settlement agreement from the West Virginia Air Quality Board.
Questions about the ASF’s grant funding were raised by Bloom during the Jan. 15 county commission meeting after a representative of the West Virginia Chapter of the Sierra Club questioned the commission’s transparency in its dealings with Longview.
The commission is negotiating a PILOT, or payment in lieu of taxes, with Longview Power for a $1.1 billion solar and natural gas expansion to accompany the coal-fired power plant on Fort Martin Road.
This will be the second such agreement between the power producer and the county. As incentive to build the existing 710 megawatt, $2.2 billion coal plant locally, Longview signed a PILOT agreement in 2003 worth $105 million over 40 years. Those dollars began changing hands in 2011.
A challenge to the permitting process brought by The Sierra Club, Trout Unlimited and the National Parks Conservation Association resulted in Longview paying $500,000 for the first 10 years of the agreement and $300,000 each year thereafter — $4 million to date. The ASF was formed to disburse that money as grants for “carbon dioxide sequestration and stream mitigation,” according to the agreement.
“The agreement is clear. And this information comes off their own website. You can look at it and see for yourself. Before I made a public statement, I went through all of this and I couldn’t believe it,” Bloom said.
“Yes they’re giving the money out. I don’t disagree with that. But is it meeting these two goals or the political interests of the board members or groups? I’ve kept quiet, but since it’s going to keep getting brought up, then I think the public should know.”
Bloom admits he’s not an expert on sequestration and mitigation efforts, but he said that by his accounting as little as $355,000 has been awarded for those efforts directly.
He points to a total of $207,500 awarded to Appalachian Mountain Advocates — a public interest law and policy organization — over five grants dating back to fall 2012 as particularly questionable.
“The ASF chose grant applications that appear to fund programs that were to stop fossil fuel programs, shut down pipelines and stop fracking,” he said. “To me, that doesn’t meet the agreement. So if the paper wants to write an editorial about how things appear and accuse me of getting this all wrong, well, I’ve gone through the numbers. This is me being OCD. This is what I do, and you’ll notice, it’s gotten real quiet since I brought all of this up.”
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