New Energy Injects Hope in a Colorado Steel Town

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New Energy Injects Hope in a Colorado Steel Town
 

  Jul 31, 2009
Pueblo Journal
   
New Energy Injects Hope in a Colorado Steel Town

By KIRK JOHNSON

PUEBLO, Colo. — Steelworkers have toiled in this unlikely spot in south-central Colorado since the days of the cowboys and the railroad barons. Renewable energy, on the other hand, is a new concept, mostly on the horizon.

Mr. Pacheco, 44, was laid off last month from Rocky Mountain Steel, where he made pipe for the oil industry. Weeks earlier, knowing he might lose his job, he put in his application at a giant plant under construction just down the road. He is hoping for a call from Vestas Towers America, a Danish company that is scheduled this fall to open the world's biggest factory making towers for wind energy.

"I loved the mill and loved working at the mill," Mr. Pacheco said over a plate of stuffed sopapillas at the Mill Stop Cafe, a hangout for steelworkers on the south side of this Hispanic-flavored city. "But I don't bury my head in the sand."

Old energy and new, old steel and new: competing economic models are in motion here, one of the last cities in the country where steel is poured for making rail, and steel is what connects the dots.

"Once you have steel in your blood, it stays," said Paul Morales, a third-generation steelworker who left Rocky Mountain Steel this year to help get the tower plant ready.

The new energy economy — a phrase Gov. Bill Ritter Jr., a Democrat, uses incessantly, to the point of parody by his critics — is playing out and paying off in places like Pueblo, which is at the overlap of areas rich in potential for wind energy, stretching north into Wyoming, and for solar energy, extending south into New Mexico.

A recent study by the Pew Center on the States said Colorado ranked fifth in the nation from 2006 to 2008 in attracting venture capital, most of which went to renewable energy.

In addition to the $240 million tower plant here, Vestas is opening two other factories in Brighton, Colo., added to one already open in Windsor, to manufacture and assemble components for making wind power. The company plans to hire up to 2,500 manufacturing workers in the state by next year.

But in a recession like the current one, the jobs and investments are not enough to make a place really boom.

The 550 jobs that Vestas plans to create here will be offset, and then some, by the hundreds of other positions that are moving away. In June, Pueblo's unemployment rate, 8.9 percent, was tied with that of another city for the highest among metropolitan areas in Colorado. By the standards of this recession, that gives Pueblo, with a population of 105,000, a mixed grade: higher than the state's seasonally adjusted jobless rate of 7.6 percent, but lower than the national average of 9.5 percent.

Now, steel and energy experts say, what the railroad magnates started here in 1881 to supply steel to the expanding lattice of freight and passenger travel lines in the West may get an unexpected second act as a place where blue- and green-collar labor is combined.

"If this works, they will have taken an old location and reinvented it," said Mark Reutter, a journalist and a historian who has been writing about the steel industry since the 1970s.

All economics, though, is local. Jobs come and go, and the trick is knowing when to leap.

Chris Esquibel, a machinist at Trane Inc., a manufacturer of commercial air-conditioning equipment across town from Vestas, will lose his job on Aug. 8. Mr. Esquibel said that layoff notices went out this spring and that he had been hesitant to apply to Vestas for fear of endangering his severance package if he was called to work. But he recently said he thought it was safe to wade into the application process.

Other families with ties to steelmaking in Pueblo, like the Evens, still see a long future for traditional steel in this city, which has always been apart, in product mix and geography, from the places usually associated with the industry.

Everett E. Even II said Rocky Mountain Steel had recently received orders for supplies to make oil pipe. "That means somebody out there is planning to drill for oil," said Mr. Even, who works for a company that supplies scrap metal to Rocky Mountain Steel and had stopped in for a drink at the Beer Barrel, a bar-and-grill near the mill. "That's positive."

A spokesman for Rocky Mountain Steel could not be reached for comment in repeated calls. Workers there say the plant has roughly 800 employees, down from about 1,000 earlier this year, with most cuts resulting from a downturn in the oil services business.

Mr. Even's uncle Bill Even, who retired this year after 34 years of steelmaking (the uncle's father had put in 46 years), was just across the bar, nursing a beer in the late-afternoon sun by the Beer Barrel's open door. He said he was also confident that steel was here to stay — even more so with Vestas's big new demand for steel that might one day, he hoped, be locally supplied.

"It won't be as big, but it will be around," he said of steelmaking in Pueblo.

Brandon Gonzales will not be around to see it. Mr. Gonzales — whose grandfather, father and father-in-law all worked at the mill — quit in April to take a job at Vestas.

Mr. Gonzales, 28, with young children at home, made the decision despite his family's longstanding ties to Rocky Mountain Steel and membership in the United Steel Workers union, which guarded seniority and spoke collectively to management. (Vestas intends to operate without a union.)

Other aspects of switching employers, however, were more clear cut.

New employees at the mill start out with two weeks vacation a year, the standard American package — even though its parent company, Evraz, is Russian. Vestas, more in keeping with the Western European tradition prevailing in Denmark, gives new employees four weeks.

Mr. Gonzales said that was a simple, powerful incentive to change jobs.

"To get four weeks off," he said, "I would have had to be at the mill 17 years."
   
   

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If it can happen in Colorado, why not Ohio?



Dennis Spisak

Mahoning Valley Green Party

Ohio Green Party

www.ohiogreens.ohio

www.votespisak.org/thinkgreen/