Big Sky Blog

Is this power plant ever good news for Big Horn County. Chronically plagued by high unemployment, 15.7% in 2003, the prospects of a large number of full time jobs the power plant will bring is really giving people a positive attitude. Then there is the new private detention facility that is being discussed and the Hardin community is hopping. The question becomes though will all this development help employment rates?

The unemployment rates in Big Horn County are not so much a factor of poor development as it is the presence of the Absaloka nation making up a large portion of the county. The way to help the tribe is economic opportunity provided by good jobs but a large part of the Absaloka nation feels that education is a waste and the lack of education makes finding a good job hard. The present administration of the tribe is making progress on this problem but it takes more than the government to fix attitudes but I digress.

I was skeptical the power plant would ever get built but now that steel is getting put together it is more than a paper project and it will help boost the local economy. I just wonder how much it is going to cost the property taxpayers, farmers and ranchers, of Big Horn County in the long run.

The master plan shows a Burlington Northern Santa Fe rail spur running into the plant, but those plans are in the future. In the meantime, trucks will deliver up to half a million tons of coal a year.

The planning for this plant envisioned they would use coal from the Absaloka (Sarpy Creek) Coal Mine and I had been afraid that they were going to decide to truck it in just as they mention here. Anybody that lives in the Sarpy country can tell you there is no way the road from the mine to Hardin can stand that kind of traffic without serious damage to the road requireing the county to rebuild it. Is this new power plant going to pay to rebuild this highway? I doubt it, the cost will be on us taxpayers.

Overall this kind of development is great for Big Horn County but I really wish there was some way to keep them from trucking the coal to the plant from the mine. They say, “It will, when its built, be the cleanest coal plant in Montana and one of the cleanest in the U.S.,” but I wonder if this takes into count the extra pollution that will be created by trucking the coal to the plant instead of using much more effecient rail transportation?

In a society of little economic development, universal inactivity accompanies universal poverty. You survive not by struggling against nature, or by increasing production, or by relentless labour; instead you survive by expending as little energy as possible, by striving constantly to achieve a state of immobility. Ryszard Kapuscinski