The news for workers in Southwestern Indiana’s construction trades couldn’t get much worse.
The last month has seen state policymakers move — for very different reasons — to scuttle two projects that each promised more than 2,000 construction jobs, plus hundreds more once they were up and running.
The Indiana General Assembly approved a tough, new regulatory measure that left developers of the proposed $2.6 billion Rockport coal-to-gas plant say that, save a Hail Mary pass in the state Supreme Court, leaves them no way to go forward.
And Gov. Mike Pence on Friday announced he has pulled the plug on state incentives intended to finance the construction of a $1.8 billion fertilizer plant at the Ports of Indiana in Mount Vernon.
Now, local economic development officials who badly wanted the jobs those projects promised to bring are left scratching their heads.
“It’s just kind of an interesting place we find ourselves in, where we’re turning down business,” said Greg Wathen, the president and chief executive officer of the Economic Development Coalition of Southwest Indiana.
He ticked off a list of major projects that have come to Southwestern Indiana in recent decades. The Toyota plant in Gibson County came to mind. So did Alcoa in Warrick County.
Wathen put the fertilizer plant in Mount Vernon and the coal-gasification plant in Rockport in a similar category of enormous job-drivers. He said if those deals are scuttled, the hole can’t be filled through small-scale projects.
“That’s just difficult to replace in today’s economy,” he said. “The number of trade jobs in terms of just labor — construction labor — is pretty significant.”
The Rockport and Mount Vernon projects — both conceived under former Gov. Mitch Daniels and negotiated through his Indiana Finance Authority — fell under sharp criticism, for widely differing reasons.
The Rockport deal involved a 30-year guaranteed-purchase contract. The state government would buy the plant’s synthetic natural gas at a pre-negotiated rate, and then resell it on the open market, with 17 percent of all residential and commercial ratepayers’ bills bet on the deal earning them savings over its full term.
That prompted consumer advocates and utilities to complain. They pointed to a shale gas boom that they claim will provide abundant natural gas at prices that are lower and more stable than the nation has seen in recent decades.
The criticism of that Rockport deal was all about economics. The Mount Vernon fertilizer plant, meanwhile, is about national security.
Fatima Group, the Pakistani company that was financing the plant, came under criticism in December by a Pentagon official who said the company needed to do more to keep its product manufactured in Pakistan out of the hands of insurgents who were using it to develop improvised explosive devices in Afghanistan.
Pence froze that deal when he took office, and ultimately decided he wanted nothing to do with the company until the changes it pledged to make to its product and that product’s delivery have been tested by the United States.
The merits of that criticism are worthy of debate — and they’ve been the subject of much discussion in recent months.
The point economic development officials make is that large-scale projects are so few and far between that those opportunities to remake the local economy and chip into a still-high unemployment rate must be seized.
Opponents say the potential cost in both instances is nowhere near worth it, and that the state can’t make bad deals just for economic development’s sake.
For now, local officials like Wathen say they’ll continue to look for ways to make the fertilizer plant happen without the Pence administration’s support.
“Boy,” he said, “it’s tough.”