Mont. city told to release power plant documents

GREAT FALLS, Mont.

An exasperated District Court judge has ordered the city of Great Falls to make public nearly all the documents detailing the financial relationship between the city and a power plant developer.

The Montana Environmental Information Center filed a lawsuit nearly three years ago seeking information about the city's stake in the proposed Highwood Generation Station being developed by Southern Montana Electric Generation & Transmission.

"The city made bad decisions, all in the name of SME," Anne Hedges, MEIC program manager, told the Great Falls Tribune. "Hopefully that's coming to an end."

The MEIC sought information on the obligations the city made on behalf of its residents in partnering with SME in plans to build a coal-fired power plant near Great Falls. When they could not get financing for the plant, the cooperative decided to pursue a gas-fired plant. The cooperative lost $9.1 million of its $40 million investment when the power source changed and the city of Great Falls lost about $1 million of its $2.3 million investment.

District Judge E. Wayne Phillips had earlier ruled in the MEIC's favor, but SME sought to keep some documents private, citing attorney-client privilege, trade secrets and a confidentiality agreement signed by city officials.

Phillips said he would only consider documents that might contain legitimate trade secrets and SME extended the trade secret assertion to a 22-inch pile of documents submitted to the court.

In his ruling Monday, Phillips said he spent more than 12 hours going through about one-third of the documents, which included innocuous memos, some documents that already had been made public, a "power plant tour memo detailing extraordinarily privileged and trade secret materials such as phone numbers for making room reservations, dinner plans and flight itinerary," a copy of a newspaper article, and pricing information readily available on the Internet.

Including such documents "clearly and convincingly demonstrate that defendants did not review their documents thoroughly but, in this court's opinion, literally and figuratively dumped two boxes of documents on the court's desk and expected the court to do the work," Phillips wrote.

Phillips said he would not spend the 24 hours needed to go through the rest of the documents to determine what else should be sealed and he would not give the SME another chance to argue which documents should be kept confidential.

"They tried to overwhelm him and it backfired," Hedges told The Associated Press.

Phillips said five documents would be sealed and gave SME 10 days to locate those documents and have them marked as sealed by the clerk of court. If that is not done, Phillips said he would release those documents to the MEIC and the Montana Newspaper Association, which intervened in the lawsuit.

Great Falls City Attorney James Santoro said the city does not plan to appeal the order and said it could open the records as soon as this week. Hedges said she expects to see them on Friday.

An attorney for SME did not immediately respond to an AP e-mail seeking comment Wednesday.