Report: McConnell opposed coal plant as county leader

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) objected to the construction of a proposed coal processing plant in Louisville in the 1980s, a Kentucky newspaper reported.

McConnell’s lodged his objection when he was the top government official of Jefferson County, before he came under the national spotlight, the Hazard Herald reported.

{mosads}But McConnell’s actions may have come in an attempt to protect Louisville and help it redevelop its waterfront, not from any opposition to the business or to coal itself.

A company wanted to build the coal processing plant on Louisville’s waterfront in order to bring in coal from barges and to crush it.

“Jefferson County has and will continue to support and advocate economic development within its borders,” McConnell wrote to the Army Corps of Engineers at the time, according to the Herald.

“Yet this proposal raises several issues that deserve and require careful consideration, via an environmental impact statement.”

The report comes weeks before Kentuckians vote on whether to give him a sixth term representing the state in the Senate. He and his Democratic opponent Alison Lundergan Grimes have both tried to boost their pro-coal credentials.

Larry Cox, the county’s environmental policy director at the time, said Louisville was starting around that time to consider the harm that 100 years of industry had done to the waterfront, the Herald said. McConnell’s objection was part of a larger effort to avoid further industrial development, and not an animus for coal, he said.

McConnell’s campaign agreed with Cox’s assessment.

But a Grimes spokesman took the opportunity to hit McConnell, telling the Herald he is the “only candidate in the race to personally try to kill a Kentucky coal plant.”

The plant was eventually approved to be built in a far-off part of the city.