Pascoans, Fear Not: We Can Fight Progress

By TOM JACKSON The Tampa Tribune

Published: May 1, 2008

To paraphrase the late and lamented Gipper, there we go again.

For the third time this decade, Big Energy is knock-knock-knocking on Pasco's door, and for the third time, we're angry and we're massing. Grabbing our pitchforks, lighting our torches - alerting the consultants and bar association.

It'll be a hot, muggy, no-TV, high-speed-Internet connectionless, candlelit night before any self-respecting Pascoan rolls over for something besides precisely the energy infrastructure that existed when she moved here. Not in her backyard.

We have the energy … well, not the energy, but the drive and the know-how.

At the dawning of the century, bristling with confidence from surviving the Y2K crisis, we beat back the natural gas pipeline proposed by Duke Energy and Williams Cos. That worked out well for us. Rerouted 60 miles south to emerge at Port Manatee, the renamed Gulfstream pipeline injected $60 million into the local economy in the first year, pays a steady $1.8 million in annual property taxes, makes zero demands on local services and maintains full-time, full-benefits jobs for 16 skilled workers.

But we are nothing if not proudly consistent in our myopia. Neither do we want anything to do with the money-saving, renewable energy, household garbage-recycling and composting bio-landfill proposed for rural east Pasco County. We blissfully embrace all levels of misinformation if it serves our purpose.

Mobbing-Up Will Stop 'Em

Now it's fear-and-loathing time at the prospect of high-voltage electrical transmission lines - HVTL - tracking State Road 54, linking upward of 2 million Progress Energy customers with a future nuclear-fueled plant in Levy County.

At this rate, mobbing-up against the corporate energy highwaymen who keep the lights on, ceiling fans turning and garage-door lifters lifting may surpass strip-club hopping, cow-tipping and Little Road tailgating as the county's pastime of choice.

Well, who wouldn't prefer the half-baked hysteria crackling through the Rushe Middle School cafeteria Monday night when about 400 fearful villagers jolted Progress Energy representatives who thought they had come for a friendly discussion about possible transmission line routes?

Opponents, who would have been everyone in the room not receiving regular direct deposits from Progress Energy, struck all the expected chords but especially an adverse effect on nearby-property values, suspected health risks, and injury to residents' quality of life from the transmission towers' downright unsightliness.

Not Pretty; But Dangerous?

This last goes without saying. Power towers ain't pretty. Not even when they're festooned with high-rise platforms that eagles and osprey eagerly convert into aviaries. But other objections are so energy-starved they couldn't fire a night light. So in the interest of illumination, a little myth-busting:

The autumn 2007 edition of The Appraisal Journal, an industry magazine, reports that high-voltage transmission lines "have no significant effect on residential property sales," but that where effects are evident, they "disappear at a distance of 200 feet from the lines."

As for health risks, no credible study performed in the past dozen years has identified a link or causality between high-voltage lines and any of the conditions - including leukemia, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease) or miscarriages - cited previously by activists with causes to pump and lawsuits to win.

Indeed, the two most notorious claims of injury from low-intensity electromagnetic fields, published by the prestigious Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the University of California in the 1990s, resulted, federal investigators said, from "intentionally falsified data." Research biochemist Robert P. Liburdy's motivation? Six million dollars in federal grants during the decade.

In short, only ambitious kite-fliers would suffer measurably from the introduction of HVTL to the S.R. 54 corridor. (Easy for This Space to say; its author lives in New Tampa. True enough, but all the likely routes converge to pass, literally, barely the length of a football field from and within sight of my very own backyard.)

Anyway, if, ultimately, the path through Pasco makes the most sense, we'd prefer they refrain altogether.

We prefer the alternative, which California - ever hostile to improvements and expansions of its electrical infrastructure - demonstrated abundantly a few summers back: stifling brownouts and rolling blackouts.

In fact, Pascoans of the no-power-lines-today, no-power-lines-tomorrow, no-power-lines-ever set are so committed to the cause, we're ready, immediately, to install automatic breakers to cut off power to our houses and businesses during any period of peak demand. Really. We'll do our part.

Let's show 'em, gang. Solidarity! Hands up, anybody ready to be severed from the grid every noon to midnight from Memorial Day to Labor Day. Anybody? Anybody?

Oh. So that's how it is. Dear Progress Energy: Never mind.

Columnist Tom Jackson can be reached at (813) 948-4219.