HOLLAND – The Sierra Club announced Monday that it had sued the Holland Board of Public Works over plans to expand its James De Young power plant. The group is arguing that the plan does not call for sufficient pollution controls on the expansion and does not address prior federal Clean Air Act violations.

But Department of Environmental Quality officials said there had been no recorded violations of the plant’s air permits nor any concerns raised about its repair and expansion plans.

“Especially in today’s economic climate the Holland Board of Public Works should clean up its existing plant before it sinks hundreds of millions of dollars into another polluting project,” said James Gignac, Midwest director of the Sierra Club’s National Coal Campaign. “The Board’s desire to more than double the size of a project that has been polluting illegally for years shows a great disregard for public health and environmental quality.”

But Robert McCann, spokesperson for the Department of Environmental Quality, said agency regulators had not records of any permit violations by the plant. And he said as far as the agency was aware, the activities planned by the Board of Public Works were within approved permits.

Anne Woiwode, state director of the Sierra Club Michigan Chapter said the violations were not too much emissions, but changes made to the plant that required permits the board never requested.

“The burden was on the Board of Public Works to make sure they were complying with the Clean Air Act,” Woiwode said. “From what we’ve seen so far we believe they weren’t.”

She said the group has not taken its findings to the DEQ for action, but would be willing to provide information as it can during the course of the litigation.

The DEQ announced Monday an informational session on the permit applications for the expansion on Tuesday at 5 p.m. at the Doubletree Hotel and Conference Center, Grand Ball Room, 650 East 24th Street, Holland. Official hearings are scheduled for January 12 and 13 at the same location.

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