Land Swap Needed for Power Plant Dies

The city of Los Angeles will have to look elsewhere for electric power and conservationists must find another way to acquire 392 pristine acres as parkland in the Santa Monica Mountains after a bill to pave the way for these developments quietly died in Congress last week.

Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) killed legislation that would have traded about 294 acres of Upper Franklin Canyon above Beverly Hills and 98 acres of Corral Canyon above Malibu--both owned by Los Angeles--to the National Park Service for about 5,882 acres of Nevada land owned by the Bureau of Land Management. Both agencies are part of the U.S. Department of the Interior.

Much of the Nevada property was to be used for a power plant that the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power proposed to build around the turn of the century in White Pine County in northeastern Nevada.

The measure would also have established a 12-mile-long federal utility corridor in Nevada for electric transmission lines.

The land swap bill, long sought by Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Panorama City), was overwhelmingly approved by the House earlier this month but failed in the Senate because of Reid’s opposition.

Reid, who was urged by environmentalists to oppose the measure, said Californians should place power plants in their own state.

He also asserted that the plant was a “plastic carrot” that Los Angeles never intended to build. He said the city was using the proposal to gain the one-mile-wide power corridor so it could buy and transmit surplus electricity from a plant in Utah.

“They were trying to shield their real intentions, which was to send cheap Utah power to feed Los Angeles’ power demands,” Reid said. “What do we get out of power lines?”

Eldon Cotton, DWP’s assistant general manager, said Monday that Los Angeles had initially intended to use the corridor to transmit surplus power from utilities in Utah, Idaho and Montana but eventually planned to build a power plant in Nevada as well. He said other Western states also would have used the corridor to exchange power on a seasonal basis.

“We’re surprised and disappointed,” Cotton said. “This was by far the best option and the one that was preferred by Western utilities.”

Berman acknowledged that “the implications turned out to be much broader than I ever thought.

“This corridor was going to be a way that many Western utilities were going to ship excess power to Los Angeles and would be an inducement for construction of additional utilities,” Berman said.

Proponents of the measure maintained that construction of the power plant outside Ely, Nev., would generate jobs and tax benefits for hard-pressed White Pine County. The measure also included $5 million to purchase and preserve environmentally sensitive Nevada lands and 1,000 acres of BLM property.

Under the measure, Los Angeles would have acquired the 1,000 acres and turned it over to Henderson, Nev., to compensate for the impact of the proposed transmission corridor on the city.

In a bid to appease environmentalists, Berman also required that any new power plant meet strict anti-pollution standards. Nevertheless, the lawmaker said, Nevada media so adamantly opposed the measure that Reid could not support it “without putting his head in a noose.”

DWP must now consider other long-term options for obtaining electricity, Cotton said. The Nevada plant could have supplied up to 30% of the city’s electricity after 2000. Cotton said there is no short-term energy shortage expected.