Eureka Springs aldermen don’t want 160-foot-tall transmission towers spoiling the view around the tourist town.
Southwestern Electric Power Co. applied with the Arkansas Public Service Commission on April 3 to build a substation near Berryville and to run a high-voltage power line from there to Centerton in Benton County, at least 48 miles away. That would require about 288 towers, six per mile, on some proposed routes that skirt the area north of Eureka Springs.
“They’ll be sticking up above the treetops,” said Alderman James DeVito. “I’d say most of the trees are 70 or 80 feet high. The towers will definitely stick up above the canopy.”
The City Council unanimously passed a resolution Tuesday opposing five of six proposed routes for the transmission line on aesthetic grounds, said DeVito. The only route the resolution doesn’t apply to goes about two miles south of Eureka Springs and is SWEPCO’s least preferred route.
“We have one industry, and only one industry,” De-Vito said, referring to tourism. “It’s not like we’ve got shirt factories and things like that. This scenic beauty I think is what makes us.”
DeVito said the f ive proposed routes that are closest to Eureka Springs pass by “significant tourist attractions that are visually inspiring.”
Although none of the proposed routes are within the Eureka Springs’ city limits, transmission towers for the 345-kilovolt power line would be visible from some of the area’s most famous vantage points, he said.
The resolution states that these “tourism assets” would be “threatened by the encroachment” of the power line: U.S. 62 (the main entry point to the city), Spring Street, Thorncrown Chapel, Lake Leatherwood Park, the Beaver Bridge, Beaver Lake, Inspiration Point on U.S. 62, The Great Passion Play and Pea Ridge Battlefield. Such encroachment would negatively affect tourism, according to the resolution.
The new transmission line and Kings River Station are necessary to provide electricity to the area in the future, said Peter Main, a spokesman for SWEPCO. The Southwest Power Pool, which consists of nine states, plans for the area’s future electric needs and recommended the new infrastructure, which would cost an estimated $116.7 million, he said. The power lines will be used by several different companies, including Carroll Electric Cooperative Corp., which serves much of Carroll County as well as customers in 10 other Arkansas and Missouri counties.
The new power line would be primarily in Benton and Carroll counties, but alternate routes could include Madison and Washington counties in Arkansas and Barry and McDonald counties in Missouri.
The proposed line would require cutting a 150-footwide swath through the heavily wooded area for at least 48 miles, depending on the route chosen. Transmission towers would average 130 to 160 feet in height, said Main.
Aesthetic impact is one of seven criteria considered by the three-member Public Service Commission when determining where to put transmission lines, Main said. Other factors include cost, health and safety, engineering and technical concerns, environmental and ecological disruption and disruption of existing or planned property uses.
“Any facility, any transmission line, is going to have impacts,” said Main. “It’s very much a matter of attempting to balance the various impacts.”
The 880 landowners whose property could be affected by any of the routes have until Thursday to file a petition of intervention, said Main. They have all been notified by U.S. mail, he said.
As of late Tuesday afternoon, nine had filed petitions to intervene, according to the commission’s website, apscservices.info.
A total of 1,584 public comments opposing the transmission line had been received as of late Tuesday. John Bethel, executive director of the Public Service Commission, said that was a “significant number.” Petitions normally are accepted only from people who own property that will be directly affected, Bethel said.
Public comments will be taken until the commission holds a public hearing on the matter, which will likely happen in late summer, Bethel said. An administrative law judge will preside over the hearing, he said.
The process is somewhat like a trial with briefs being filed, witnesses giving testimony and others rebutting that testimony, Bethel said. The process is explained in Arkansas Code Annotated 23-18-501 through ACA 23-18-530.
The commission isn’t bound by any of the routes proposed by SWEPCO, Bethel said. The commission could use a combination of the proposed routes or come up with a new route, he said.
Morris Pate, the mayor of Eureka Springs, said it’s his job to sign the resolution but not vote on the matter.
“I don’t really know if you could see it or not,” said Pate, when asked if the towers would be visible from the locations mentioned in the resolution. “Some say it’s here. Some say it’s there. It’s funny, they don’t want it going by Eureka Springs, but they don’t mind it going south of here. What about the other people’s environment?”
Pat Costner, an environmentalist who lives near Eureka Springs, said SWEPCO needs the transmission line to sell power it generates at its coal-fired John W. Turk Jr. Power Plant plant in south Arkansas to entities out of state.
“Meanwhile, all the Ozarks will have to show for it is a big, long, naked, herbicide-sprayed scar,” Costner said in an e-mail. “Now how many tourists are likely to come to see such a plug-ugly thing?”
But Main said Northwest Arkansas has to import power from other states.
“Power plants in Northwest Arkansas are only part of the region’s power supply,” he said in an e-mail.
At peak demand in summer, the two major plants in Northwest Arkansas - Flint Creek at Gentry and Mattison at Tontitown - provide 800 megawatts of the 1,400 megawatts required to meet demand and reserves, he wrote.
“The Northwest Arkansas electric load center is largely isolated from the rest of the SWEPCO system, including the Turk Plant,” wrote Main. “Power along the proposed line will directly support reliability in the Northwest Arkansas region” because the new line will tie into and reinforce the existing network in eastern Benton and Carroll counties.
Other power must be imported over transmission lines from outside Northwest Arkansas, including traditional power plants in Oklahoma.
“Also, that is how SWEPCO and the electric cooperatives receive wind power from wind farms in Oklahoma, Kansas and Texas,” he wrote.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 10 on 05/01/2013