Energy-Arizona^1.4

http://www.svherald.com/articles/2007/09/09/news/doc46e38986a770a937335389.txt

By Ainslee S. Wittig

BOWIE - When Bruce Brown left in the mid 1980s, the Bowie Unified School District enrollment fluctuated between 140 and 180 students, K-12th grades. He's been back for the last four years and he currently has 88 students enrolled.

A group of Bowie residents met Wednesday to discuss what went wrong with the booming little town, which had more than 800 people in the late '60s and early '70s, and is now hard-pressed to "scare up 350," Brown said.

"Most families, in order to do something, they leave town. There's nothing for them here. If the school does good with students, you're assured they'll go somewhere else," said Brown, superintendent of Bowie Unified School District.

He is not alone in his view about Bowie, a town that sits on the interstate between Willcox and the New Mexico state line. It's also a town that has been in the news because of a proposed power plant that would be two miles north of it, one that is viewed as an economic boon if it comes.

But, for now, some Bowie residents live knowing better days have been in the past, and they hope they'll occur again in the future.

"We used to have three hotels, a truck stop, grocery stores, seven gas stations and three restaurants," said Bobbie Blandin, a lifelong resident. "But the traffic base shifted from through town to around town in the mid '60s when I-10 was constructed. And then the railroad pulled their crews and shifted to Houston and Willcox. And we don't have the cotton farmers due to government control. We thought we'd survived the construction of the interstate, but look at us now."

Florina Christiernsson and her husband own the only garage in town, but they are barely surviving.

"We used to be a diesel mechanic, but the 4K Truck Stop came in and took away our business. We don't have enough work and we can't afford to hire anyone else," she said.

Christiernsson, 53, said the people left are on every board available because no one else will take on the responsibility. She is a volunteer firefighter, and on the chamber board and school reunion group.

"We're tired, but no one else is coming along," she said.

Brown sees a town where residents must pull up their own boot straps to get things done.

"If you don't take on several community service groups, a) it doesn't get done, or b) it stays a vacant position. No one has actually been elected on my school board in six to eight years."

Retiree Ernie Blandin is on the fire department board, the school board, the cemetery board and the church board.

"I do it because I love it. I like working with people and for people - and out of an obligation to give something back," he said, "but I'm busier now than I was when I worked for Hughes Aircraft."

To compound the problem, Bowie's infrastructure is crumbling around those left.

"The county hasn't improved our infrastructure, the streets need work, and they closed our airport because they didn't want to pay the insurance," Brown said. "Our property values are depressed, our tax rates are high and businesses want certain things when they come in ... schools, housing, stores. I don't know, to be honest, how you would attract a business here."

"We have no wastewater treatment plant," he added. "We need people to get the wastewater treatment plant, and we need housing to get people. It's a chicken and egg situation."

Then came the Bowie Power Station, as proposed by the SouthWestern Power Group II, which is based in Phoenix. The original proposal in 2001 was good, said Brown, and the SouthWestern Power Group has always been helping Bowie by "addressing things we are short on."

But the Bowie Power Station's Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle proposal, which came in 2006, was better, according to the five-person group, which also included Nancy Jean Welker, the first hire by SouthWestern Power Group. Welker is the Bowie liaison.

The coal-fired gasification proposal raised the number of jobs to be had from 40 or 50 to 100 to 120, increased by two and a half times the economic impact in terms of payroll, and 10 times the current assessed tax valuation.

Brown said it also had important pieces of the "Bowie puzzle," which included a wastewater treatment plant, housing and commercial development.

"They didn't care that we didn't have these things. SouthWestern Power Group wanted to know what we needed and was there to help," Brown said. "They are the only business I've ever seen that came in and said, 'what can we do for you,' instead of what can you do for us."

Unfortunately for Bowie, the difficulties SouthWestern Power Group has had selling the coal-fired gasification proposal, which the developers' officials attribute to ongoing regulatory uncertainties, market economics and the fact that public understanding of the gasification cycle is less than they thought, has led to the project again being planned as a natural gas facility, which it had been when the developer received permits in 2001 and 2002 from the county and state.

With the move to natural gas, the timeline changes significantly, with construction likely to begin within two years, said Ian Calkins, spokesman for Bowie Power Station.

Bowie residents are still grateful to SouthWestern Power Group for its natural gas facility plans, which will bring increased tax revenue, 40 to 50 jobs and possibly 150 children to the schools.

"We went fishing. We caught a keeper," Brown said. "The big one got off the hook - or maybe the people in the county just let the big one go."

Brown said he is infuriated by the "vocal minority from outside of Bowie, who doesn't live here, pay taxes here or even eat at our restaurants," who chased the Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle proposal out of the plans "because we don't have enough vision or foresight in Cochise County."

"Now I see people of Sierra Vista up in arms about the Sierra Club out of Maricopa County wanting to sue Fort Huachuca. It's very ironic. It's the same thing we see - what business is it of theirs?" he said.

Welker sees Bowie working for itself.

"Nobody else wants the power plant and we do. We weren't taking anything from anyone else in the county, and we've got what Bowie Power Plant needs - a big piece of dirt, cheaper than most places with the transportation connections a power plant needs. Why isn't the county going, 'Yeah, Bowie did something right!' " Welker said.

Regardless, these Bowie residents still see Bowie Power Station as "the first piece of the puzzle, which will help all the other ones fit."

They want people to know that the power made by the 500-megawatt natural gas-fueled, combined cycle plant will be used locally and in Arizona, and possibly elsewhere, but that Arizona is one of the fastest growing states and has already had brown-outs in Phoenix. The power is needed here, they say.

They also say they hope county residents will begin understanding that geothermal, solar and wind energy plants will not work in Bowie.

Welker and Brown said it is not hot enough year round for geothermal - it needs 110- to 120-degree days, at least, they said - and takes a huge area - in Mojave Valley that is nine square miles of parabolic mirrors to make it commercially viable - that must be heated underground to 550 to 1,200 degrees Centigrade. Bowie winters are too cold, Brown added.

And Ernie Blandin noted that the use of molten salt underground in the geothermal process may cause damage to the aquifer.

Welker said wind in Bowie is too light and variable, and then too gusty, causing damage to the equipment.

Solar, Brown said, was going to be a part of the Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle proposal.

"Is it that if we can't have geothermal, solar or wind, we get nothing?" Brown asked. "There is an employment problem in Bowie - our kids that graduate have three options: run drugs, run illegals or leave town and get a job. What do we do, just die?"

"We have a chance to have something here. And they want to stick a pin in my bubble," he said.

Blandin said he hopes people don't listen to the misinformation anymore.

"If they are going to do that, at least it should be an honest pin," he said.

AINSLEE WITTIG is managing editor of the Arizona Range News in Willcox, which is a Wick Communications Co. newspaper. She can be reached at (520) 384-3571, or by e-mail at arnassoceditor@qwest.net.