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Editorial -- Closing, not closure The end of a coke plant was inevitable; so was resistance Wednesday, February 18, 1998
The union representing workers at LTV Corp.'s coke plant at Hazelwood accuses management of setting out to fail in dealings with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to allow the aging facility to stay open for a while longer. Deliberate or not, the plant now appears doomed -- and it is doomed because the company wants it so.
LTV Corp. has been hard-nosed, but in fairness it has not been softheaded. It was always clear that, in the end, economic reality would be decisive. The fight over the closing really has been about borrowing time to delay the inevitable -- and the costs associated with such delay.
LTV's position has been consistent since last July, when it first announced the closing. Such facilities have a limited life, and by any reckoning the Hazelwood plant is near the end of it, its newest batteries dating from the early 1960s. Faced with emissions problems that it says would take $400 million to $500 million to remedy for a complete rebuilding, LTV sees the plant as an uneconomic relic that can only be shut down.
The United Steelworkers union has sought to forestall the closing, arguing that only $10 million was needed to upgrade the existing plant so that it would satisfy the EPA in its stewardship of the Clean Air Act. The union had some successes before the independent Arbitration Board -- but they have proved Pyrrhic. The death knell for the plant apparently sounded Friday when the EPA rejected the latest plan ordered by an arbitrator in January.
In ordering LTV to submit that plan to the EPA, arbitrator Elizabeth Neumeier had told the company to make one last shot at getting the agency's cooperation. The very next day, the company announced that it was operating 19 of its coke ovens without smoke and soot controls because the equipment was unsafe. Even as the union complained about the suspicious timing, environmentalists supported the company's moves to close the plant.
When it did reply to the EPA, LTV did so quickly and unenthusiastically. It did not meet with the union in framing the reply and it offered opinion as fact, two points that Ms. Neumeier faulted the company for in another ruling last week. She offered no remedy for the former, but ordered the company to clarify the latter -- which it did in a perfunctory fashion.
Finally, though, there is no remedy for any of it. The union will fight a rear-guard action, no doubt, but it can't keep the plant open over the long haul. Just as a failed marriage cannot be saved if one party fails to heed counseling, this rupture is fixed by the company's firm belief that enough is enough. As the arbitrator had previously written, LTV is "not obligated 'to spend whatever it takes.' "
To be sure, this is a sad development for the 750 workers at Hazelwood, and in the annals of the steel industry in Pittsburgh, which has seen a steel presence on this site since the Civil War. But developers are waiting in the wings, and cleaner air will be a good dividend for a city reinventing itself in a post-industrial age. In years hence, it will be judged that the union and the company each did what they had to do as the old order changed.
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