By Mark Berman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 28, 2007; VA03

The Virginia Department of Environmental Quality has ruled that the Mirant Corp. can proceed with plans to merge the smokestacks at its Alexandria power plant without a permit.

City officials say the decision will allow the plant to spew more pollutants into the air.

"The bottom line is that approving the stack merge without linking it to a permit will allow Mirant to increase the amount of pollution exponentially," City Attorney Ignacio B. Pessoa said.

On Monday, Pessoa and other city officials met with representatives from Gov. Timothy M. Kaine's office and other state officials, including DEQ Director David K. Paylor, to lobby the agency to reverse the decision. No new decision had been made by DEQ by press time.

The setback is the latest in the city's long-running battle to close the coal-fired plant that sits on a prominent site in north Old Town overlooking the Potomac River. It supplies power to the District and Maryland but not Virginia.

The most recent dispute revolves around Mirant's plans to merge its five smokestacks into two taller stacks. City officials had argued that the change required a permit, and as recently as May, the DEQ had agreed. But the state agency changed course last week and informed the city that no permit was required and that the merger could move forward within days.

The DEQ said the merger would require a permit only if it increased the amount of air emissions, and the department thought this to be the case when it issued the May decision. But the agency has since received a new engineering analysis.

In a May editorial in The Washington Post, Mirant Chairman Edward R. Muller said the company's goal in merging the stacks is to reduce the possibility of pollutants gathering at ground level near the plant.

"Because the project would not increase air emissions, the DEQ does not have the authority to require a permit for a stack merger," said Bill Hayden, a DEQ spokesman. "We're not saying Mirant does not need a permit; they still need an operating permit."

City officials and neighborhood residents are furious over the agency's reversal.

"The process here has been just appalling," Pessoa said. "There's a legal issue, and there's a public policy issue. The legal issue is that this requires a permit under the Clean Air Act in order to go forward. And the public policy issue is that we think the stack merge, as it is proposed, is harmful to Alexandria and Virginia. Because the basis of the stack merge is that you take the pollution and shoot it higher into the atmosphere, so it doesn't come down in the vicinity of the plant but comes down in a broader area. There's nothing here that will reduce the amount of pollutants it spreads."

Pessoa dismissed the new analysis, saying it is from a firm that is a consultant for Mirant. In a letter to Mark Rubin, senior adviser to the governor, Pessoa calls the report from Storm Technologies "a limited, superficial and biased analysis."

Cale Jaffe, a lawyer with the Southern Environmental Law Center who has been working with local groups on the issue, agreed with Pessoa.

It's a "pretty shocking turnaround for the DEQ to be taking this position," Jaffe said.

The DEQ is standing by the report, for now. "It gets very complicated, so I think there are a lot of perspectives on this," said Hayden, the department spokesman. "They've made their analysis, and that's the determination they've made. We've looked at this very closely, based on the legal and scientific procedures that we have to follow."