After much brouhaha and controversy last year, it appears a proposed biofuels plant along Route 66 north of Kingman, Ariz., isn’t going to happen, according to the Kingman Daily Miner.
[County] Supervisor Gary Watson said he was not surprised that the plant, which was slated to be built about 2 miles from Valle Vista, failed.
“It had a number of issues,” Watson said, including negotiating with BNSF railroad for access. “I’m not surprised that they’re looking at a different market”
Biofuel plants are also hard to finance, and it can be difficult to find buyers for the product, he said.
Residents of Valle Vista, which has been roiled by the collapse of the real-estate market, made several dubious claims during their opposition to the biofuels plant — including the notion that a non-smokestack industrial plant on a few acres would somehow horrendously “degrade” a 90-plus-mile stretch of old Route 66 in northwest Arizona.
Route 66 always has been a highway of commerce that includes car factories, oil refineries, cattle feed lots, junkyards, quarries, and other gritty exploits of American free enterprise — in addition, of course, to relatively unspoiled wilderness and splendid vistas. So it was very difficult to see how one relatively small manufacturing plant would have made much of an impact on the Mother Road in any way.
Yet another local fight concerning unique ways to use government to benefit the ruling elite, the wanna-be rich and politics.
The letters to editor had some great comments, probably the best noted that the entire thing was a well designed scam to re-zone land and then blame local environmentalists and snooty rich folks in a sleight of hand Mayor Richard J. Daley would have been proud of.
I had some time and checked the local code for such actions, and, Dan O’Connor was right. A ‘proposed’ action which requires a zoning change requires a zone change vote independent of the zoning proposal. So, the zone change could be made even if the ‘action’ the change was intended for fails and is not approved. Sort of like voting for cloture.
Both the Board supervisor and the Mayor sounded like ‘we did all we could, but the bastards just wouldn’t support us’. Reminded me of the chicken sgt in Platoon who was always kissing Barnes ass, then survived the last fight by hiding out.
Hope their new use of the land in question works out a few years down the road, when some sort of really neat new project that isn’t needed is shoved down the local majority Republican’s throats. But, whatever it will be will bring ‘maybe 2 or 3 part time low end pay scale jobs’ and a nice new real estate portfollio for many local politicos.