from the Las Cruces Sun-News
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.-A Navajo Nation enterprise sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday over the agency's lack of action on an air permit application for a proposed coal-fired power plant.
The Navajo Nation's Dine Power Authority and Houston-based Sithe Global Power have partnered to build the $3 billion, 1,500-megawatt Desert Rock plant.
The DPA and Sithe applied for an air permit in early 2004. Under federal law, the EPA has a year to make a determination and issue a decision.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Houston by DPA and Desert Rock Energy Company, LLC, seeks to force the EPA to make a ruling. Construction on the plant can't start until an air permit is granted.
Steven Begay, the general manager of DPA, said the air permit "gives the green light for a lot of other things."
"Time is money," he said. "Sithe is spending money, and we're spending money. The longer we wait, the more money we spend ... and we don't want to do that. We want to move forward."
The EPA has received more than 1,000 comments on the air permit, each of which the agency has to respond to, said Margot Perez-Sullivan, a spokeswoman for the EPA in San Francisco.
"Typically it doesn't take this long, but there is really no normal time frame," she said. "It really depends on the complexity of the project, and in this case, it is a complex process."
Perez-Sullivan couldn't say when the EPA might act on the permit application and declined to comment specifically on the lawsuit.
The Navajo Nation notified the EPA in January that it intended to sue over the permit, and when the EPA took no action after 60 days, the tribe decided to move forward with the lawsuit. The EPA and agency administrator Stephen Johnson are named as defendants.
Full Story: http://www.lcsun-news.com/ci_8617462