plants, the very fact that there are scrubbers and all of the innovative 

 ideas on the plants at Colstrip does not mean that there are not pollutants 

 being emitted into the air and the environment. Many of the effluents 

 dowrv^here, primarily the trace metals are accumulative in nature. At the 

 present time there is no knowledge whatsoever of how rapidity these things 

 may develop within our ecosystem, accumulating in the plants and animals 

 or what the impacts will be. Sulfur dioxide is a controlled effluent. 

 There is a great deal of knowledge available as to the impacts it has. 

 Most of it is bad, but here again there are some more uncertainties that 

 we're faced with in the particular community that is faced with this kind of 

 development. There was a quote in a recent federal study I am sure most 

 of you have seen not long ago. I guess it amused me it was so ridiculous, 

 but I should have been offended I guess. It stated that problems with 

 lung diseases in people in these areas, particularly old folks and cowboys, 

 shouldn't be too alarming because they weren't very productive and didn't 

 contribute much to the national economy anyway. As I said, I think 

 probably it was more amusing than anything, but nevertheless these 

 attitudes do circle around occasionally. 



Another area probably concerns me more than anything else, and I 

 think because of my stands on the issue in the past, many people relate to 

 my being strictly environmentally concerned. I think if we were to put 

 the four items that I am addressing here as far as impacts in an 

 chronological order that the environmental aspects would be the least of my 

 concerns today. The third and probably the most important and serious 

 are the social impacts. In our community we have seen the imposition of 

 new and different values and principals on a rural 



community--superimposed on a rural community. There have been people 

 brought in from all over the nation, from all over world, and I am not to 

 say that these are bad people or that there's anything wrong with them. 

 I'm only saying that their values and prinicpals are different and the 

 things that are important to rural people in that community or were 

 important, are not important to them. There're more of them than there 

 are of us and there's no question that they have superimposed their values 

 into my community. And in a sense we're strangers in our own homeland 

 right now. And I think that the controversy that we have created 

 because of our opposition to this thing has probably polarized the positions 

 somewhat and some of the situations we get into are not too nice really. 

 It's unfortunate, but that's the way the thing stands. 



One other area that is a perpetual problem in any growth area is that 

 of school problems. The state of Montana, as you all know, has a coal 

 severance tax that was designed to create monies to handle impacts in 

 these rapidly growing areas. When that piece of legislation was before the 

 legislature I opposed it and made a lot of my environmentalists friends 

 mad. Probably not for the reason that I would oppose it today--that I was 

 concerned about the state of Montana becoming hooked on coal revenues, 

 the narcotic effect of it. Today, I think I would still oppose it to some 

 degree because I don't believe it's being implemented in the manner that 

 was intended. The people in Helena seem to find all kinds of reasons to 

 justify sending the money somewhere else rather than to where the impact 

 is and this, I am sure, is alarming not only to the people in my community 

 but to the people in industry that are paying these taxes. I think that if 



