Cleaning up Green Bay's air

Katie Nekola

Clean Wisconsin has long advocated the cleanup or shutdown of Wisconsin's fleet of antiquated, dirty coal plants. Earlier this year, we got curious about how much Green Bay utility Wisconsin Public Service Corporation's (WPSC) J.P. Pulliam power plant pollutes the air, because the oldest of the six operating units was built in the 1940's and should have been retired long ago. The company submits quarterly reports, and when we reviewed them, we discovered that during the past five years, the plant had violated the limits set by its air permit in every single quarterly reporting period.

This is very serious. It shows an ongoing disregard for the environmental effects and health effects caused by all the soot this ancient coal plant belches into the air in Brown County. It shows a total lack of concern for the effects on air quality in neighboring counties. Door County, for example, which has virtually no industry, has air quality problems that drift over on the wind.

This is especially serious because the Pulliam power plant operates under lax rules that only apply to older power plants, which means that it is not even meeting standards that should have been upgraded long ago.

In July, Clean Wisconsin and Sierra Club teamed up and sent a letter to WPSC, notifying them that if they did not take steps to clean up the Pulliam power plant within sixty days, we would file a lawsuit to compel them to do so. This lawsuit would be a citizen suit under the Clean Air Act, filed in federal district court, and would charge the utility with multiple violations of their "opacity limits"—a term for the thickness of the smoke coming out of their stack. We held a press conference on the shore of the Fox River, across from the huge, dusty coal piles, to announce our intent to clean up this plant and to hold a community meeting to talk with local citizens about the problem.

In August, we met with officials from WPSC to discuss our concerns and our demands. They agreed to offer us a proposal for how they plan to clean up this dinosaur of a coal plant. We will consider their proposal and, at that time, decide whether it will solve the problem or whether we need to move forward with legal action.

If you are a Clean Wisconsin member living in the Green Bay area and want to attend a community information meeting, sign your name to a letter-to-the-editor, or simply voice your concern about this issue, please contact Will Hoyer at Clean Wisconsin at 608-251-7020, extension 20 or email whoyer@cleanwisconsin.org.

In the meantime, we'll keep you informed on the developments of this important work.