PRESTON, Minn. — The man who would have burned 10 million tires a year in Preston, Minn., has blinked.
Faced
with having to conduct an environmental impact study for his proposed
tire incineration plant, Robert Maust wrote a letter to the Preston
City Council saying he was canceling plans for the project. He hinted
at pursuing the idea elsewhere, however.
"A comprehensive impact
statement would have exposed the dangers of this plant even more than
we realize today," said Ken Tschumper, a La Crescent, Minn., area
farmer and member of Southeastern Minnesota Action Committee, one of
three local groups that rallied grassroots support against the tire
plant.
Maust's Heartland Energy LLC had planned to build the
largest tire incinerator in the United States, capable of burning 375
tons of tires a day and 10 million tires annually, to generate an
estimated 23 kilowatts per hour of electricity.
Tschumper thinks
the cost of the environmental impact study was another key reason Maust
backed away. "He told me himself an EIS would cost $500,000," Tschumper
said.
In a statement released Tuesday, Tschumper's group said
they were pleased by the outcome but "we can't rejoice because Bob
Maust plans to do to another community what he has done to ours ...
This tire burner should not be built anywhere."
Another group,
Southeast-ern Minnesotans for Environmental Protection, had filed a
lawsuit against the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency that gave
opponents a second chance to convince the agency's citizen board to
require the study.
County boards of La Crosse, Houston, Fillmore
and Winona counties also approved resolutions asking for the study.
U.S. Sen. Mark Dayton and various other senators, congressmen and
mayors came out in opposition to the plant.
David Krotz is a reporter for the Winona (Minn.) Daily News.
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