ANDERSON — The crowd at the packed First Church of the Nazarene stood and cheered loudly when Mayor Kris Ockomon informed them their months of hard work had paid off.
The group’s members had gathered to oppose plans for a waste treatment plant proposed for the city’s south side, and their force had been building since late October, when Northbrook, Ill.-based PEAT International announced its plans to build the facility at Indiana 109 and County Road 500 South.
“Tomorrow, it will be official that PEAT will be no more,” Ockomon announced Tuesday at the meeting.
He said Denny Cooper, who owned the property being sold to PEAT for the plant, had withdrawn the company’s obligation to the contract after the company had failed to sell the idea of the plant to the community.
Ockomon also announced Tuesday that he would not support the plant, although the city’s Board of Zoning Appeals already had granted PEAT a special exception for the facility.
“If I wasn’t sure about it before, I am sure about it now,” he said. “I say no to PEAT. The more that I looked into this process, the less I liked about it.”
Ockomon mentioned that PEAT had no facilities in the United States with which to compare the one proposed for Anderson and that he was worried the Indiana Department of Environmental Management’s recent decision to cut funding for local air quality control would leave PEAT unsupervised.
State Reps. Terri Austin and Scott Reske and state Sen. Tim Lanane also attended the meeting as a sign of support for those working against PEAT.
City officials had been working since last January to attract the company to Anderson, and Ockomon said he thought landing a company that claimed to be green would help him leave a good impression in his first year as mayor. He said he wasn’t afraid of looking bad for initially supporting PEAT.
“The ultimate bottom line is that I keep and protect the citizens of this city,” he said.
But Sid Hiatt, a resident whose home would have been next door to the factory, said he didn’t think the mayor had the residents’ interests in mind throughout much of their fight against PEAT.
“It is ironic to me that if the citizens within four days knew this was no good for Anderson, it took from the (first Ockomon-PEAT) July meeting until tonight for them to know,” Hiatt said.
Hiatt said the city’s initial support of PEAT was a knee-jerk reaction.
“All they could see was 40 jobs,” he said.
Hiatt went from being sick to his stomach when PEAT first announced its plans to immeasurably happy the ordeal ended Tuesday.
“I’m elated,” he said. “The little guy wins one once in a while.”
Ockomon said PEAT officials were not happy with his decision to not support the project, but PEAT spokesman Nelson Slavik was not available for comment Tuesday night.
PEAT — which stands for Plasma Energy Applied Technology — had planned to build a facility that would turn waste to energy using plasma torch technology. Upon the announcement of the company’s plans, nearby residents quickly gathered to protest PEAT, saying the plant would release harmful chemicals into the air and lower their property values.
The effort involved hundreds of manhours and was the beginning of a new group of volunteers involved in Anderson and Madison County, group organizer Andrew Hopper said.
“It’s the beginning of a new united effort to secure the future for the citizens of Anderson,” he said.
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PEAT facility: Mayor says no
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