So here it is, the paragraph correcting my error in Sunday’s preview of what is anticipated to happen this week at the contested case hearing on Hyperion Refining’s preconstruction air quality air permit application. The hearing is set to re-convene Tuesday in Pierre before the DENR’s Board of Minerals and Environment. That’s the board that will grant, or not grant, the required permit for the proposed oil refinery/energy center:The South Dakota Department of Environment and Natural Resources has not made changes to the air-quality permit being sought by Hyperion Refining since the start of a contested case hearing in May and did not meet with a Hyperion consultant earlier this month. The meeting took place June 14-15, 2008. A story headlned “Battle Over Hyperion Air Permit to Resume” on Page A1 of the Journal’s June 21 edition contained incorrect information. (more…)

NORTH SIOUX CITY — Overheard as a couple looks over the various sample ballots before voting at the community hall here: “You’re not an independent honey, you’re married to me!”

***

Poll workers were waiting for a deputy sheriff to arrive at the North ioux City polling place. They had one absentee ballot coming. It had been delivered to the wrong precinct and needed to reach the right one, at the community center, by 7 p.m. to count. They weren’t really worried. They were notified a little before 6 p.m. that he had left Elk Point, ballot in hand.

“And he has a siren,” one worker quipped.

****

 Vote-rich North Sioux City, like the other polling statins we’ve visited today is apparently  experiencing record turnout in today’s primary. “Way busier,” is the way 40-year-veteran poll worker Mardelle Cole put it.  She said it was never this busy even when Dakota Dunes and North Sioux City were a single precinct.

By 5:30 p.m., 652 of the 1,141 register voters in the precinct had cast ballots, of 57 percent. That includes 79 absentee ballots, but not the one on its way.

“I’ve been here 30 years,” said Buck Miller, a McCook Lake man who was a volunteer poll watcher at North Sioux for Hyperion Resources. “I’ve never seen a turnout like this.”

 ***

As he left the polling place, Jim Schroeder, of McCook Lake, said he voted against the zoning for Hyperion’s proposed oil refinery. “I live out here, I don’t need the pollution,” he said. He also said that none of the mailings or other information put out in the past few days had changed his mind; he’d had it made up for along time.

As in most major elections, the most active supporters and opponents in tomorrows ballot question on the zoning Hyperion Resources needs to build its $10 billion, 400,000-barrel-per-day oil refinery, will join their disparate fellow campaign workers at separate locations Tuesday night to watch the returns come in.The polls close at 7 p.m. and the first returns will be available at 8 p.m., with updates every five minutes afterward, according to Union County Auditor Carol Klumper. Klumper will be putting up the numbers in the commissioners’ room at the courthouse where the public is welcome.However, Hyperion executives and those who have worked to get out the ‘Yes” vote will gather at the Elk Point home of Joyce and “Bort” Bortscheller. Joyce was busy preparing for their guests earlier today  when she said it wasn’t exactly a party.  If it goes badly for them, she said, “We’ll cry together. If it passes, we’ll celebrate together.”

As they say, it ain’t over yet. In fact, the most intense days in the run-up to Tuesday’s primary election — and the ballot question on zoning for Hyperion Resources’ proposed oil refinery/energy center — are upon us, opponents, proponents, voters and journalists.

My colleague Dave Dreeszen and I will be following the race, both in this space and in print.

On Sunday, we’ll be boiling down the issues one last time, looking at voter registration trends and providing practical information on where and how to vote, along with an online map of the precincts to help get voters to the polls.

On Monday, we’ll be out following the last push by refinery opponent groups Save Union County Committee and Citizens Opposed to Oil Pollution, as well as those by Citizens for Hyperion and the company itself, with reporting online and in Tuesday’s paper. We’ll also run the list of polling places and the map of the precincts again.

Journal Editorial Page Editor Michael Gors has runs volumes — and volumes — of letters to the editor both for and against the Hyperion project, for nearly a year. But the mailbox shuts down at noon today. Any letter not already submitted will not be considered.

Click here to submit a letter.

The final letters ahead of Tuesday’s election will be published on Saturday and Sunday. After that, it’s all about what you think — and which way Union County votes.

Citizens for Hyperion, a grassroots group supporting the proposed Hyperion Energy Center in Union County, has a new spokesman — Jim Towler, a Dakota Dunes resident who works for North Sioux City-based Brown Construction as a project coordintor.

Towler, a longtime local business leader who served as the city of Sioux City’s project coordinator project for the Tyson Events Center, succeeds J.B. Mercer as spokesman for Citizens for Hyperion. Mercer, of Jefferson, S.D., recently accepted a job in Des Moines.

“It just kind of proves my point,”
Mercer, who had already cast an absentee ballot for the June 3 election in Union Conty over a Hyperion-supported zoning change, earlier told the Journal his relocation to central Iowa demonstrates one of the major reasons for supporting the $10 billion project.

“We need better paying jobs around here,” he said. There’s aren’t too many opportunities.”

Mercer and his wife, Peg, contributed $300 to Citizens for Hyperion’s ballot question committee, according to a campaign finance disclosure firm the group filed last Friday. Towler and his wife, Julie, contributed $250 to Citizens for Hyperion’s ballot question committee.

Towler also represents Brown Construction on the Dakota Valley Business Council, which contributed $2,500 to the ballot question committee. DVBC, a group of business leaders in the Dakota Dunes and North Sioux City area, is staffed by the Siouxland Chamber of Commerce.

My story in print and online today details the campaign finance activity of the four ballot question committees — two in support of the proposed Hyperion Energy Center and two against.

Included is an itemized list of individual contributors of $100 or more for the four groups — Save Union County, Citizens Against Oil Pollution, Citizens for Hyperion and Hyperion Energy Center Referendum. The latter committee was formed by Texas-based Hyperion.

Through May 19, the four groups combined to raise nearly $100,000 to help sway the Union County electorate in the June 3 referendum over a zoning change that would permit Hyperion’s refinery and gasification power plant, including $45,000 from Hyperion itself. (more…)