The opinion piece below from TWW’s Greg Brophy originally ran in The Daily Sentinel on August 8, 2023 and can be accessed here.
Economic benefits start to flow from power line project after 15-year delay
Aug 8, 2023
By GREG BROPHY
Much has been said about the federal permitting reforms that were included in the bipartisan deal to raise the federal debt ceiling and avoid the threat of a first-ever default on the national debt.
Those reforms, originally championed by House Republicans and eventually supported by the Biden White House, will make the federal permitting process for newly proposed energy and infrastructure projects faster and more focused.
But if the Biden administration truly supports the cause of permitting reform, it will also have to move quickly on permitting decisions for existing proposals that have been stuck in the process for years.
Every day those projects continue to be held up under the old rules is another day that mostly rural communities will be denied the considerable economic benefits tied to the construction and operation of those projects.
Consider the case of the TransWest Express Transmission Project, which will connect wind farms in Wyoming with major urban centers on the West Coast.
Despite the clear benefits of the 732-mile transmission line, it was held up for 15 years in a textbook example of how broken the federal permitting process had become.
At one stage, different parts of the federal bureaucracy were actively working against each other on opposite sides of the debate over whether to build the project or whether to block it. Your tax dollars at work, as they say.
Earlier this year, sanity prevailed at last, and the project got the final approvals needed from the federal government. Construction started in June, and the groundbreaking brought together officials from across the spectrum: Republicans and Democrats, business groups and labor unions.
The event brought into focus something that was almost completely forgotten during the interminably long permitting process: The economic benefits from building and operating the power line itself.
TransWest Express is a $2.9 billion project, and in rural America, that’s a big deal. Not just because of the jobs tied to building and operating the project, but because of the local tax revenues a $2.9 billion capital project is able to generate.
An analysis prepared by TransWest estimates $891 million in property taxes will be paid across four states — Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and Nevada — during the long-term life of this project.
A further $113 million in sales taxes will be generated as well, according to the TransWest analysis. Taken together, the property and sales taxes from this landmark transmission line project will total more than $1 billion over 50 years.
On average, that’s more than $20 million per year going into local services: From schools to law enforcement, fire protection to parks and recreation, public libraries to public hospitals.
Many of these local services in the rural West operate with budgets measured in the hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, so an extra $20 million per year on average is a big deal.
But that’s just scratching the surface. The construction of a major new transmission line will spur investment in new power generation projects that will connect to that transmission line. New solar arrays, wind farms, advanced nuclear reactors and other forms of electricity generation will generate further economic activity, including jobs and tax revenues.
These projects can make a huge difference in rural America. A study conducted by The Western Way, where I serve as Colorado state director, examined the upside for communities that see major new investments in renewable energy.
The study, which focused on the Eastern Plains of Colorado, found that funding for local services in a community with major renewable energy investments grew twice as fast as a neighboring community with little to no renewable energy investments.
“The construction phase boosts the Main Street economy and wind farms generate a lot of property tax revenue, which helps school districts, fire districts, county government, city government and other local services in our community,” Kit Carson County Commissioner Dave Hornung told the authors of the study.
The lesson from the TransWest Express case is that permitting delays don’t just hurt the companies that want to build infrastructure projects. Permitting delays also hurt local communities by denying them the economic benefits — including badly needed tax revenues — that flow from those projects.
Washington, D.C. bureaucrats don’t need to wait for a new round of permits, submitted under new rules, to make things better. They can start today by finding projects that have been needlessly delayed and give them the green light as soon as possible.
Greg Brophy is a farmer and former state senator from Wray. He is currently the Colorado Director for The Western Way.