| Biographical Non-Fiction posted December 27, 2024 | Chapters: |
-8- 
|
  |
How I helped get Joe Manchin elected Governor
A chapter in the book Can You See the Real Me
One of Them is Packing a Gun
by CM Kelly
| Background Warning - This is a Novella. I wrote this with the mindset of explaining and providing details not typically seen in short stories. In a way, I hope it is educational. |
“Hal, I think we need to take a break, these negotiations are getting too heated”. The look I got from my supervisor Hal seated to my right, was one of severe outrage. How dare I tell him to “calm down”, especially in front of the contractor we were negotiating with? Seeing this in his face, I said, “Honestly, I’d bet you all the money in my pocket that one of those men across the table is packing a gun”.
The next sound I heard was that of a snub-nose 22 pistol being slammed on the table. Tommy, the muscle of the negotiation team, had pulled it out from his hidden chest holster, and he had slammed it on the table with the barrel pointed at Hal.
My face had turned away from Hal, towards the gun, and then up to the faces of the negotiation team. They all had one of those “gotcha” smiles on their faces. But Hal was having none of this joke, he abruptly stood up, took his arm, and swiped most of the documents, but not the gun off the table. He spewed out, “Get the hell out of here! You don’t bring a gun onto my property! Move it! Get Out!”. There wasn’t time for Tommy, Joe, or Billie to muster up a reply. They gathered their documents and rushed out the door to their pickup trucks.
Hal was more than flustered, he was red-faced, and due to his age and generally obese health, I seriously thought he might have a heart attack. I also knew there was nothing I could say after his actions or theatrics. I was kind of glad Hal made such a dramatic move. We were clearly losing control of the negotiations. It definitely put them back on their heels. I could only hope, that Hal’s outburst would make our next meeting more productive.
++++
So with that as the setting, let me provide the background that led up to this event. It was the early 1990s, I had left the coal mining industry a few years earlier and joined Mission Energy (“Misson”). Mission was the unregulated subsidiary of Southern Cal Edison (“SCE”), one of the largest utilities in the US. Mission was charged with investing 100’s of millions of dollars of SCE’s capital into the new and burgeoning Independent Power Producers (“IPP”) industry.
One of the many good things that came out of the Jimmy Carter administration was the deregulation of the utility industry. In 1978 the Carter Admin pushed through legislation titled PURPA (The Public Utilities Regulatory Policy Act). This legislation allowed for nonutility companies to build power plants across the US. It took a few years to work out the bugs and secure the needed supporting legislation enacted in the states, but by the mid-80s it was a vibrant and growing industry.
Non-utility companies (or IPPs) could now challenge, via a bidding process, any new power plants that a utility deemed necessary for their consumers. The idea was that by bringing “competition” into the quasi-government-run utility industry, new and better technology would develop with the end goal being cheaper electricity. Ironically the utilities themselves got into this game by creating their own IPP subsidiaries. Thereby, allowing them to build power plants “outside” of their state-defined franchised areas.
To the surprise of many, including the utilities, it worked! As the utilities finished their build-out of the massive Nukes and coal plants authorized in the 70s, the next wave of new plants needed to supply America’s growing electricity demand was being met by IPPs. IPPs, without the burdensome oversight of various state agencies, and the top-heavy bureaucracy of the utilities were able to: utilize new technology, lower engineering and construction costs, operate with less overhead, and reduce operating costs. The utilities still had a major role, primarily via the negotiated Power Purchase Agreements (“PPAs”) with the IPPs. These PPAs provided the utilities with certainty regarding the schedule, availability, reliability, and costs of the electricity from the IPPs. The PPAs provided the necessary contractual obligations to lock down financing for the IPPs.
Mission was one of these IPPs. It was created in the mid-80s and was up to full steam by 1990 when I joined them. I was brought on board as a mining-materials handling expert for an 80 MW waste coal-fired plant just starting construction near Grant Town WV.
++++`
The Grant Town Power Plant was the idea of an ambitious startup IPP company located in Philadelphia. They found an abandoned coal prep plant site, the former Federal #1 Mine located adjacent to Grant Town, WV (pop 700). The idea was to utilize the waste coal piles from the old prep plant to feed a boiler to make electricity.
The boiler design was a relatively new technology called Circulating Fluidized Bed (“CFB”). This technology allowed low-btu fuels to be efficiently burned. The CFB technology opened the market for many low-btu coal, waste coal, and garbage power plants to be built.
In many ways, it was a win-win. Utilizing new technology to clean up ugly old coal waste piles at Federal # 1 and the surrounding area while making a profit for its investors. The 3-year construction cycle would bring 2-300 workers to this area, many of them from the local union halls of ironworkers, pipe fitters, boiler makers, electricians, welders, and general laborers. Any trade specialists coming from afar would fill up the trailer parks and local hotels.
Upon completion, the plant would require 60 full-time jobs to operate the power plant and a least two dozen more full-time positions to supply the waste fuel and manage the disposal of the gypsum ash refuse. The increase in property taxes and sales taxes would provide a clear benefit to Grant Town and its school district.
When I joined Mission, the Engineering-Procurement-Construction (“EPC”) contract for the project was in place. The design had been locked in, permits were in hand and the earthwork had just commenced. Mission had a part-time Project Manager on the job, but really no field persons or what I would call worker bees. I was thrown into the frying pan, put into the position of “don’t ask why, just do it”.
As the designated Project Engineer for this project, I certainly added immediate value. I recall on my first visit to the site, stopping construction of the access road. It had a 7-8% grade, twice the grade one would encounter on most West Virginia roads and that’s saying something. Realizing that at some point all the waste coal and limestone, over a million tons/year, would come up and down this steep hill, this road needed to be built extra-extra stout.
I looked at the contractor's specs for the road, which turned out to be the equivalent of a home driveway spec, totally unacceptable. After a few intense days of negotiating, the EPC Contactor agreed to increase the underlying rock thickness, add a Geotech fabric, and relocate some key drainage features at no cost. In reality, the EPC’s field supervisors all agreed with me on these changes, it was the home office managers that resisted it. This day-one encounter with the EPC Contractor built instant credibility. [By the way, the road was in almost perfect condition 30+ years later when I went back for a site visit in 2024].
The construction aspect of the project had many ups and downs. Despite being designated as the Project Engineer for this $200M plus project, I knew nothing, and I mean nothing about power plants. What I did have was a pretty good “Bu-l Sh-t” radar and there was plenty of that coming from the EPC Contractor and their engineering group. Over the 3 year construction period, there was a lot of head-butting.
Although it’s been 30 years since it was built, a few of those “head butts” still remain in my head:
• Finding over 3,000 defect welds on the boiler tubes
• Finding a major disconnect between the “issued for construction” drawings for the stack and the “approved air permit”.
• Abating a “Cease & Desist” order from the US EPA District 4.
• Redesigning the waste fuel processing plant because it failed all of its tests.
Any one of these four issues would warrant a separate chapter by itself.
Within a year at Grant Town, I got promoted to Project Manager (PM), aka the # 2 man on the site. I reported to the Executive Director, Hal. There was a lot of learning and growing during those three years. Least I not forget our 2nd child, Elizabeth Ashely, was born during this time. It was an exciting and very challenging time. I am very proud to say that in the end, the project did come in on time, on budget, and met all of the performance requirements, namely; the emission standards, the heat rate and the net electrical output.
Unfortunately, the company that Mission hired to operate the plant was incompetent, to say the least. When I was leaving the project, it was clear that the new operators had major issues. On my last day on the site, I recall my departing statement, “I’ll be back in 6 months to clean up the mess you will make”. One of those “hey when I was here everything was working perfectly” kind of statements.
Yep, six months later I got “drafted” to go back to “Fix Grant Town”. Within three months I turned the plant around, from losing $500k per month to being in the black. It would take another book to fully describe the effort over those 3 months. A listing of some of the steps I took to “right the ship” were:
• Laying off 30% of the workforce
• Reducing OT from 40% to 5%, clearly there was some fraud going on
• Re-establishing the waste fuel mining plan that I developed before I left
• Inventing a new process to mine and store the waste silt
• Renegotiating the natural gas supply contract (gas was used to start the boilers)
• Renegotiating the limestone supply contract to reduce cost
• Re-negotiated the waste coal mining contract
• Fixing the sulfur dioxide (SO2) detector system to cut limestone consumption in half.
The last one is worth some additional detail. When I first got back to the plant, it was obvious to me, and only me, that the Control Room was receiving bad SO2 signals from the highly sensitive & expensive instrumentation in the plant’s chimney. Consequently, the plant operators were over-feeding the boilers with limestone to control the SO2 emissions. This had numerous secondary impacts:
1) The extra limestone reduced the internal temperature of the boilers so much, that they had to turn on the natural gas burners to maintain the boiler’s flame.
2) The extra limestone put an unrealistic load on the bottom ash and baghouse systems, causing extreme wear and tear on these systems. This led to numerous unscheduled outages or extended periods where the plant ran at a reduced load.
3) To supply the extra pulverized limestone, the limestone mill at the plant had to operate 24/7, instead of the designed 12 hours/day.
It only took me 20 minutes to climb up to the SO2 monitoring equipment platform with the plant’s two mechanics. A quick inspection of the equipment, located at the junction of the metal ductwork and concrete chimney, revealed that the slight vibrations in the ductwork were causing the faulty signal. The most obvious solution was to install a dampening device like a rubber gasket between the SO2 sensor and the ductwork. Clearly, neither of the mechanics had ever climbed up the duct work to look at the SO2 monitoring equipment.
I instructed the plant’s mechanics to find a gasket and install it ASAP. The next day the mechanic informed me that they found a suitable gasket from the equipment manufacturer, but it would take several weeks to arrive. I looked down at my desk and said, “So what you’re telling me is that I have to wait three weeks to get a gasket like this mouse pad that is sitting here on my desk”? They were dumbfounded. They were experienced utility-trained mechanics; thus, they had no ability to think outside of a manual. Nothing like an underground coal mine mechanic, who were masters of all trades and could think outside the box. It was painfully clear to me, that we needed new mechanics at this plant.
I gave the mechanics my mouse pad, walked over to the storage closet, and grabbed two more. I asked them both if they had a knife on them, and they said no, it was in their toolbox in the warehouse. I asked myself out loud, “So what mechanic doesn’t carry a pocket knife”? I grabbed my car keys which had a small Swiss army tool on the key chain, a few pieces of paper and a Sharpie. Together we immediately walked/climbed up to the SO2 monitoring platform. We called into the Control Room and told them what we were doing. I used the paper to trace and cut out a gasket and used the Swiss Army knife to loosen the bolts. Within 10 minutes the problem was solved. Within seconds the erratic SO2 signals in the Control Room disappeared.
Yes, I could have waited for them to go get their knife and tools, but I was making a point, a strong point. If you wanted to work here you had better start thinking differently.
In the end, that simple 99-cent change allowed the plant’s capacity factor to rise significantly, back to the level we achieved 6 months ago. With much less bottom ash and less limestone milling, it also greatly reduced the plant’s maintenance. This directly supported my action to lay off 30% of the workforce and eliminate OT.
This one simple act essentially got the plant back into the black. Call it “Yankee Ingenuity” or just common sense, it’s a trait built into the coal miner’s psyche. I have experienced this “find a way to fix it” in the coal mines countless times, but it’s a trait lacking in most power plant workers, especially if they were trained at a large utility.
The other bulleted items above also had similar benefits. Some took a day or two to implement others took a few weeks. Overall my second tour at Grant Town lasted about 90 days. Combining all these changes, the plant’s run time or Capacity Factor went from approximately 50% to the high 90s. In fact, the plant would go on to win several Capacity Factor awards for a waste fuel plant for many years.
++++
Ok, so getting back to the pistol-packing negotiations.
As the construction and start-up aspect of the project was coming to a close, I was charged with establishing contracts to supply the waste coal and remove the gypsum/ash. Initially, I thought it would be a rather easy task. First, the subject matter was in my wheelhouse. Not only was I a Mining Engineer but I developed the initial mining and ash disposal plan to get us through the startup and testing phase of the project.
Secondly, to mine the startup fuel we utilized a local contractor that performed all of the project's civil work to get the plant built. Basically, I already had a mining and ash disposal template with actual performance data. I had the ingredients to provide the basic tenets of a long-term fuel and ash disposal contract.
My plan was to create some competition. I would bring in 2 or 3 other local contractors, issue them all a bid package and give them a month to submit their bids. Once the bids came in, I would do a thorough evaluation of the key metrics like cost, safety record, environmental record, bonds/insurance, financial standing, experience, and condition of equipment. No problem, as others would say easy-peasy.
BUT…
++++
The first issue out of the gate was with the gob or waste coal itself. The coarse material was composed of 60-80% non-bituminous material, basically shale, clays, and limestone or sandstone. The Federal # 1 Mine was initially opened in 1901. Located along Paw Paw Creek it mined the rich Pittsburgh Seam and shipped its product to the coke ovens and steel mills via a short rail line to the nearby Monongahela River.
Grant Town, a typical coal or “patch” town for the period, was built by the mining company. Eventually, a coal wash plant was built so the product of the mine could be sold to power plants. Federal # 1 exhausted its reserves and was shut down in 1985. By the time I arrived in 1990, the only remaining signs of a once vibrant coal facility were the railroad tracks, an abandoned powerhouse, and a pair of concrete coal silos. The mountain of gob looming across Paw Paw Creek left the standard telltale sign to any passerby-ers that a coal mine once existed in this holler.
Grant Town was still there but with less than half of its peak population, it was a shell of its former self. Per the most recent census, all of the residents lived below the poverty line. The town was generally tidy & clean and the original company houses were kept up. The mine ran for over 80 years, I’m sure there were many generations of memories in those homes.
Like all underground coal mines in the Pittsburgh Seam basin, the raw coal coming out of the mine contained about 20% inert material (shale, clay, sandstone). There is no value in shipping this inert material to a power plant or steel mill. Thus the inerts were “washed” out as the coal went through the prep plant. The output from the coal prep plant was a uniform clean coal product that typically had a BTU value over 14,000 btu/lb. But due to the inefficiencies of the coal prep plant a fair amount of good coal “leaked by” into the waste streams or gob. This gob was stored in hollers or ravines adjacent to the prep plant, in this case, the Arnett Run Holler.
Federal # 1 typically produced 2-3 million tons of coal a year, which meant it produced roughly 500k tons of gob per year. After 84 years of operating, there was a substantial mountain of gob located just up Arnett’s Run. This waste material would be the low-grade fuel for the Grant Town Power plant. With the mine shut down, the gob pile was an eye sore, but to some adventurous entrepreneurs in Philly they saw “gold in another person’s trash”.
The advancement of the rather new CFB boiler technology allowed low-btu fuels like waste coal or garbage to be efficiently burned to produce electricity. The combination of the new CFB technology and Jimmy Carter’s PURPA law opened the door for businesses to step in to eliminate the gob piles, and of course, make some money. Eventually, over a dozen CFB plants were built in the 90s throughout PA and WV all tied to a gob pile or culm pile as they are called in the Anthracite Coal region of Pennsylvania.
++++
Because Federal # 1 was operating at the turn of the 20th century, the coal washing technology was rather crude as compared to a modern coal prep plant. Due to the older technology, a lot of “good coal leaked out” into the gob piles. The impact was that the older the gob pile the better the gob, just like wine and husbands. The Federal # 1 gob pile had an average btu level of 5,500-6,500 btu/lb. About two to three times higher than a gob pile created after the 1970s.
A very important aspect of gob was that it had two distinct components.
a) The “coarse gob”, what you typically will see in pictures of coal mines of Appalachia can range in size from 1/16th of an inch to 3-4 inches. It was dry and rather easy to load and haul. It was a good fill material and thus was typically used to form dams or impoundments for the second component. At Federal # 1 this material had a BTU value ranging from 1000-4000 BTU/lb., and it had a pretty high sulfur range of 5-8%
b) The fine material or “silt” is less than 1/16th inch in size. Its BTU value ran from 8000 to 10,000 BTU/lb. and its sulfur value ranged from 1-3%
No doubt, silt was the material one would want to burn, but three factors worked against using high levels of silt at Grant Town.
First, the CFB boilers were designed for low-BTU fuels, to a degree the CFB technology ”cooked” the waste fuel, like a charcoal grill, whereas a standard pulverized coal boiler ignites and burns the coal pretty much like fuel oil. Consequently, the designers of the CFB technology only allow 10% of the fuel to be silt.
Secondly, silt was difficult to mine, it was like quicksand. Using a dozer or front-end loader required a gifted operator, otherwise, the machine would sink into the silt and bring work to a halt.
Thirdly, a gob pile was generally made up of 20% silt and 80% course material. From a mass balance point of view, you had to mine 8 tons of coarse material for every 2 tons of silt.
As you can quickly tell there had to be some juggling of the figures to make sure the fuel met the CFB designer requirements. Nothing that an Engineer, especially a Mining Engineer couldn’t figure out. Thus, the details of the mining operations would be a key component of any long-term fuel supply contract. Otherwise, a contractor could “high grade” the gob pile, and within a year or two the project would only have the very low BTU coarse material left.
++++
Back to the negotiations - I called up the three contractors and informed them I would send a bid package to them. A week later we would have an on-site walk-through with separate Q&A sessions for each contractor. Again easy-peasy.
BUT…
After I issued the bid documents, I got a call out of the blue from the local WV State Senator, Mr. Joe Manchin. The Grant Town project was Joe’s baby, in a way you could say he was the father of the project. Maybe better described as the “God Father”. He had no direct investment in the project. He was helpful in bringing the development parties together and helping with any potholes the permits might encounter while getting State approvals.
I had met him several times over the course of the plant's construction, primarily to help quell some local issues involving noise or traffic. He made quite a first impression; It didn’t take long for one to realize this guy was “going places”. He was the “golden boy” of the Manchin family. A family that had a long political history and strong ties with the Democratic party.
I learned at Consol Energy, and it was reinforced at the Grant Town project, that it was generally best to avoid local politicians. Not that they didn’t serve a role, but I always felt multiple agendas were being played or favors being accumulated. What developers call “Political Capital”. To an Engineer, this was as foreign as learning to speak Greek. Kinda like a dentist. Yes, you need them but you always try to avoid them.
Joe’s call was about the mining-ash disposal bid documents and why he didn’t get a copy. I responded with a simple reply, “You’re not a mining contractor”. Joe went on to great lengths that he knew every contractor in the area and could pull together the A-Team to perform this work. On that point I really couldn’t challenge him or doubt a word he was saying, so I sent him a bid package. Having four bidders would not be a problem. Easy-peasy.
BUT…
I thought I would get the bids all back in a few weeks, evaluate them and then get it executed. I had done it more than a dozen times at Consol with dollar values much higher than what this contract would amount to. But, now Joe was in the picture, every other day there was a call from him asking for clarifications as he scrambled to build a competent team. He was new to this bidding/award process. As most politicians do, they live off of “handshake deals” and “my word is good”. I thought, no harm, Joe had helped me and the project many times, so holding his hand through this was a nice payback. As the phone calls progressed it was getting more apparent that Joe couldn’t pull a team together. Plus, since I would be departing the project shortly after the fuel contract was in place, I didn’t want to have this drag out.
++++
The bids came in from all four entities. Two of them were very polished and detailed. One looked like they gave it half a try. Then there was Joe’s bid. Joe's was pretty much a 2-page submittal saying they could do it for a given price. No answers or details pertaining to company finances, insurance, staffing, experience list, etc., all the basics of a bid package. To me it was a simple decision, Joe’s bid would be rejected based on non-compliance “Nice try, better luck next time”.
I completed my evaluation and was somewhat pleased to see that the existing on-site contractor had the highest evaluated score and the lowest cost. I don’t remember the exact figures but they weren’t far off from the values in the table below:
Bidder $/ton
A (Buddy) $1.50
B $2.50
C $2.75
Joe $4.00
It was encouraging to see Bidders B & C so close together, which implies a tight contract spec and good knowledge of the expected work. Both B & C had reasonable comments on the contract’s Terms and Conditions (T&Cs).
Bidder A, the onsite civil company, was pleasantly (or suspiciously) low and they had only one comment to the T&Cs. Yes, they were currently working on site and knew all the ins and outs of the work required, but the gap between 1st and 2nd place was a concern.
Bidders B and C's prices were slightly lower than the project’s proforma values, which was comforting. With ~ 1 million tons of Gob and silt to be handled each year, these bid prices saved millions of dollars. Bidder A’s price would be a huge savings. But I needed to get some clarification before I could award the contract. Joe’s bid was just not in the same league, dollar-wise nor the quality of the bid response.
I called the owner, Buddy, of Bidder A. We agreed to meet the next day. Buddy’s company was a small family-run business. He was about 55 years old and had been doing earthwork ever since he came back from “Nam”. He started his company about 15 years earlier. It had about a dozen workers at least half of whom were related to him. I worked closely with him to get the mining and ash disposal work done during the startup and commissioning phase of the boilers. He was a good man in all regards.
This was the first time I ever had to approach a bidder and say, “Did you really mean to price your services so low?”. But I knew that low bidders who get their foot in the door, usually wind up being a pain in the ass with Change Orders. Buddy didn’t seem to be that kind of a guy.
I met Buddy on his home court, his field office, at the foot of his D8 Caterpillar dozer. It was a nice clear day, standing next to the dozer with the smell of diesel fuel, the heat of the Cat engine, and the dust from the mining operations, all in the shadow of the power plant, it just made this a perfect setting, (well at least to this Mining Engineer it was a perfect setting). I was in a good, no great mood. The bids were in, the price was below budget and I was leaving in a few weeks.
I hemmed around the price issue, seeing if he had lowballed the price. It wasn’t the case. I asked about his only comment to the T&Cs, it was an odd comment I had never seen before. Since the contract was for 5 years, he had asked to insert a very simple clause, “The price shall escalate at 2% per year”, but it would have “one wild card” in it, “to renegotiate the price if diesel fuel increased by over 15%”.
He explained that he and other civil contractors got “burned” by the 73 and 79 oil embargoes and he had concerns about other government actions that could create a spike in gasoline/diesel fuel prices. He had run the numbers and felt he could absorb a 15% increase but nothing more. To me, both the fixed annual escalation rate and the wild card request seemed very reasonable.
But I had to ask, how are you getting your price down to $1.5/ton? Buddy took a deep pause, stared at his boots, then looked up at me and said, “I have cancer, they tell me I won’t make it to the end of the year”.
He went on to explain that all the equipment in his company was paid off, with no leases or rentals, thus the low per-ton rate and low escalation rate. His two sons, both equipment operators, and his daughter, the office manager would inherit the company. He had crunched the numbers hard with them and they agreed on the price.
Because they were all just barely out of high school, he wanted to leave them with a sound long-term contract so they could better learn the business, get some experience and have a steady income. We both knew that the civil construction business was very competitive. Contracts like this one only come up once in a decade.
Of course, this set me back. Oddly, I had a very similar incident happen with a bulldozer operator at a small construction site back when I worked at Consol. He too told me he had cancer. The last words he said to me were, “You might not see me here next week, I intend to die in my boots and on this dozer”. I came back to the site two weeks later anxiously wanting to see him. The construction crew told me he had passed away a few days earlier while operating the dozer. He had lung cancer, apparently, he was coughing up blood during the whole project. At my current stage in life, I forget a lot of things, the death of that operator is one I haven’t. In part, it’s the reason I am writing these stories down.
I couldn’t look at Buddy’s face, I shook his hand and told him, “I’d get back to you shortly to wrap all this up”. The next two weeks should have been smooth sailing, just clean up a lot of administrative issues, get the waste coal contract signed and leave the site, once and for all. On to “bigger & better things”.
BUT…
I called the other two bidders, there were some typical generic questions, like how close were the bids, what was the deciding factor, etc., but they accepted the decision. When I called Joe to inform him, he dug in and wanted to know exactly why his team didn’t win. I went through the list of criteria and said most of their replies were nonresponsive and his A-Team team had no experience. He had essentially picked up a few friends and put their names on a piece of paper. As much as he tried I would not reveal the winning price. It was an ugly call but I was firm and honest. After I hung up I thought that was the end of it.
BUT…
The next day Hal pulled me into his office and said, “We have an issue”. He had gotten a call from Bill the Senior VP for Mission stating that Joe Manchin had called him and said that I wrongly evaluated the bids and was going to award it to some unqualified contractor at a price that was surely lowballed. Of course, I had all my facts and ”ducks in a row”, so I sent a quick report back to the Senior VP. I did not mention that Buddy had cancer.
An hour later we were on a conference call. The first reaction from the Sr. VP was “Wow this is a great price and great terms”. The second reaction was, “Just tell Joe that he has to match this and he will get the contract”. I gave out a big “WHOA, that’s a very unfair position to the other bidders, Joe does NOT have the right of 1st refusal. Plus, he doesn’t have the basic competency. Selecting Joe would lead to huge production, quality, and safety issues”.
There was silence on the phone. Followed by a few generalized questions. I had stepped over a line with my management, but I felt that the Sr. VP was in the wrong in every aspect of his solution.
At the end of the call, the Sr. VP said, “Just hold tight, don’t award or sign the contract until you hear back from me”. Of course, I was pissed. This was no way to conduct business. I went back to my office and pulled out my resume.
Even though I had joined the company three years earlier, I knew the Sr. VP well enough to say what I did. He knew I had a stellar reputation within Mission (it's legal, accounting, permitting, and engineering departments) and that my efforts over the past three years added a lot of value to the project and saved it from being shut down for a very long time (i.e. the PA-EPA’s Cease and Desist Order)
Over the next few days Hal and I tried to work out a comprise with Joe, basically trying to give him a piece of the pie. Without any success, Joe flew down to Mission’s offices in DC in his private plane, met with the Sr. VP, and struck a “paper napkin” deal. Essentially they took $1 off of Joe’s price and gave him the deal. When this was laid out to me as “take it”, I had only two items that Joe had to match: 1) ALL OF THE T&Cs from the low bidder, i.e. a small annual escalation, with the single wild card and 2) adherence to the established mine plan. The Sr. VP agreed, and the deal was done. At least that's what I thought.
I did have a follow-up meeting with the Sr. VP, it was the first time someone told me that I didn’t see the ‘big picture” and it wouldn’t be the last. I accepted this deal as a “lesson learned”, I moved on, but bridges had been burned. Eventually, I had to have a talk with Buddy, it was not an easy discussion. Somehow he had heard through the grapevine that Joe was mudding the water. He was experienced enough to know that these things happen. I don’t know how I could have fought harder for him. A few months later one of his sons called me, he thought I‘d like to know that Buddy had passed away.
++++
Ok, finally, we are now we’re back to the pistol-packing negotiations.
But just one last clarification. I have never been one to hold a grudge. In this case, I accepted what had transacted, it was time to move on and make the best of the situation. It probably comes from working in the coal mines. If something bad happened, like a roof fall, or a broken-down machine, you didn’t sit around and complain about it, you just moved on.
++++
So there we were, Hal and I, standing in the conference room after unceremoniously kicking Joe Manchin and his team off the property. It was an eerie next few days, not knowing who would make the next step. Then one day Hal stepped into my office and asked me to “just get it done”, he didn’t have the energy or will to fight this battle. It wasn’t the first time Hal pulled this act with me. Over our 3 year relationship, he pulled this tactic of raising a lot of drama (aka hissy fit) only to ask me to step in and clean it up. A few days later I would meet up with Joe by myself and resolve all the open issues. I closed the deal; I got it done.
I left the project a few weeks later to work on coal plants in NJ and India. I did make a few trips back in the ensuing months to handle an issue or two, but as noted above the Operating Company hired by Mission was pretty inept, the place was falling apart. Of course with Hal and Colin out of the mix, Joe pushed his weight around, and the cost eventually crept back up to the $4/ton level.
As I described above, I would return to Grant Town and “Right the ship” for the long term. I am very proud that the plant has won so many awards and is still running strong 30+ years later.
Of course, Joe Manchin went on to bigger and better things, he became WV’s Secretary of the State, was Governor of the WV from 2005 -2010, and then onto his current position as US Senator.
Although it can never be proven, in my mind there is no doubt that the fees Joe obtained in the waste coal–ash contract helped him along his political path.
Warning - This is a Novella. I wrote this with the mindset of explaining and providing details not typically seen in short stories. In a way, I hope it is educational as I tried to describe (rather document) the details of underground coal mining and power plant construction/operations. I lack professional training or writing experience. I hated my HS/College English and literature classes. My passion has always been engineering, with a focus on numbers, formulas, equations, and algorithms. Thus, the two Engineering Degrees. Somehow I obtained some management-people skills that helped me climb the corporate ladder. All of my stories are based on actual events, of course with some embellishment.
Pays
one point
and 2 member cents. 
You need to login or register to write reviews. It's quick! We only ask four questions to new members.
© Copyright 2025. CM Kelly All rights reserved.
CM Kelly has granted FanStory.com, its affiliates and its syndicates non-exclusive rights to display this work.
