New York Biomass Incinerator Awaits $100 Million Handout

New York Bio­mass Incin­er­a­tor Awaits $100 Mil­lion Handout

August 17, 2013, Source: Mid Hud­son News Network

The Tay­lor Bio­mass waste-to-ener­gy project has had the sup­port of U.S. Rep. Sean Patrick Mal­oney, D‑Cold Spring, since his can­di­da­cy for Con­gress last year.

The Orange Coun­ty facil­i­ty is await­ing a $100 mil­lion loan guar­an­tee from the U.S. Depart­ment of Ener­gy and the fresh­man law­mak­er said Thurs­day that the Oba­ma Admin­is­tra­tion is now tak­ing note of the project.

The project is expect­ed to cre­ate about 300 jobs. Mont­gomery is about 20 miles south of New Paltz.

“I am pleased that the pres­i­dent and the Depart­ment of Ener­gy have been respon­sive to my request that they get focused on this because we can’t wait; we need the jobs right now,” Mal­oney said. “The guy out there who has mil­lions of dol­lars of his own mon­ey invest­ed in this, who is a mem­ber of the oth­er par­ty – it has noth­ing to do with this – who has skin in the game, who has a good idea that could bring hun­dreds of good jobs to this region, that’s the kind of stuff I want to do in Con­gress,” he said.

Tay­lor Bio­mass Pres­i­dent James Tay­lor has been plan­ning the bio­mass facil­i­ty for years and has lined up a num­ber of clients for when it becomes operational.

Mal­oney made news when he broached the stalled project with Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma in a recent closed-door meet­ing and the pres­i­dent report­ed­ly snapped at Maloney.

Accord­ing to a CNN report, Mal­oney asked the pres­i­dent about the Tay­lor Bio­mass appli­ca­tion and received what one uniden­ti­fied source describes as a “rude and dis­mis­sive” response from Oba­ma, who alleged­ly said the issue should have been tak­en up with White House staff members.

Area envi­ron­men­tal groups have resist­ed the fed­er­al loan to the bio­mass facil­i­ty, say­ing there are incon­sis­ten­cies between the project and the goals of the fed­er­al clean ener­gy pro­grams. Lau­ra Haight, senior envi­ron­men­tal asso­ciate for New York Pub­lic Inter­est Research Group, ear­li­er this month said, “we’re not sur­prised that the pres­i­dent didn’t want to dis­cuss the project’s loan guar­an­tee appli­ca­tion. Polit­i­cal pres­sure makes it hard­er for (the Depart­ment of Ener­gy) to do its job and eval­u­ate the project’s impacts objectively.”

Mal­oney, how­ev­er, said this week dur­ing a tour of the dis­trict that there are “a lot of good things that are going on here” and that the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment “needs to be a part­ner in help­ing local busi­ness and fam­i­lies weath­er some tough eco­nom­ic times.”