A Bozeman "free market" think tank is taking the State of Montana and Silver Bow County to task for concealing details of a feasibility study for a wind turbine assembly plant in Butte.
In March 2008, Governor Brian Schweitzer swooped into Butte to announce that the German company Furhlander wanted to build a plant in Silver Bow County to assemble turbines for power generating windmills. Soon afterwards, the economy began to tank and the company hedged its bets by going slow with the project.
The state and Butte-Silver Bow teamed up to pay for 94 percent of a feasibility study for the project. Furhlander picked up a small part of the tab but wanted large parts of the document kept secret.
That's when Bozeman's Montana Policy Institute took notice.
"You can't just throw a few nickels at a study and then have the public pay for the rest of it and use those few nickels as an excuse to hide whatever you want from the study from the public," said Carl Graham of the Montana Police Institute.
The governor's Chief Business Development Officer Evan Barrett says the state is not at all uneasy about how the study was handled.
"The public has a right to know, but also, companies have a right to certain kinds of privacy of information," Barrett said.
But while Barrett says the state isn't uneasy about the handling of the study, Graham is.
"These aren't nuclear weapons designs we're looking at here. I'm not sure what 20 pages of trade secrets is," Graham said.
The Community Development Director for Butte-Silver Bow Karen Byrnes says her job is to help create jobs, and Furhlander's $25 million investment could mean more than 100 good new jobs right away and hundreds more later.
"I'm not going to argue with them about which parts or how much should be redacted. If they feel it's damaging to their company, I believe it's their right to be able to hold that back," Byrnes said.
"I want to help their company come to Montana," Byrnes added.
Graham says he is for any positive economic development and could even become a cheerleader for this project, if he just knew a bit more.
"We don't know if it's a good project, because we don't know what's been hidden," Graham said.
"We're trying to figure out why they're nosing into this, because it doesn't seem to be any particular purpose other than it may be trying to derail a project," Barrett said.
"Nothing could be further from the truth," Graham responded. "We're not out to get anybody with this."
"The best thing for us could be they could break ground in Montana, in the Butte-Silver Bow area and begin assembling the turbines. That would be a great day for all of us," Byrnes said.
- John Sherer reporting for Montana's News Station
