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Farm owners fear coke plant arrival

Five generations of Persch family have lived on Niederlander Lane farm.

Larry Persch's family has lived on this farm in Monroe about as long as the steel mill next door. A planned SunCoke plant would be an unwelcome neighbor to Persch, who worries about the contamination of his land.

Staff photo by Gary Stelzer Larry Persch's family has lived on this farm in Monroe about as long as the steel mill next door. A planned SunCoke plant would be an unwelcome neighbor to Persch, who worries about the contamination of his land.

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By Jessica Heffner, Staff Writer 7:11 PM Friday, September 11, 2009

MONROE — Five generations of Larry Persch’s family have lived on the 50-acre farm on Niederlander Lane. It’s been a home and means of livelihood. But they fear a new neighbor 20 feet away may threaten its future.

Unlike many properties located near where a $340 million SunCoke plant could be built to supply AK Steel's Middletown Works with coke and electricity, the Persch farm has arguably been there almost as long as the steelmill. Larry said his great-grandfather bought the property in the early 1900s, around the same time the American Rolling Mills Corp., or Armco, was founded.

Up until the last 15 years, the family lived off the land, planting soybeans, corn, hay, wheat and raising cattle. They began leasing the land when Larry’s aunt, Betty Metzcar, was diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease. Larry, his wife, Donna, and Metzcar have a home there. So does his daughter Lori Moore, and her husband, Matt, and two children, on four acres of their own.

Larry loves the land, the flat plains of crops and the rolling hills dotted with wildflowers, trees and streams. He cruises the property on a cart with his three dogs, surveying the areas where they used to host the neighborhood baseball diamond and last night’s camp site. The 67-year-old said he’d like to raise cattle again, and have some land to give his grandchildren “so that in the future they would at least have a piece of ground. But with things the way they are going, I am not sure that’s going to be.”

He’s concerned because of the 2,700 tons of hazardous materials SunCoke could emit from its stacks, and how it could potentially harm the crops and sicken livestock who graze off the land. More than that, Larry said he worries about groundwater contamination, an issue he said the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency has failed to address. With the company saying it will use water to keep dust down from the coke and coal piles, “all that water has got to go somewhere,” he said.

Son-in-law Matt Moore said at the second Ohio EPA SunCoke air permit hearing in Middletown Sept. 2 that the whole process “was a joke.”

His wife, Lori, said the plant is “devastating” as she worries about how protect the health of her family with new coal piles and railroad tracks so close by. .

“You’re trying to figure out how you are going to live with that next door and never really seeing a permanent plan as to exactly where everything is going to be,” she said.

It’s not that he feels his land is worth more than the dozens of neighbors he talks to everyday, or that he doesn’t know Middletown needs jobs. Larry said he just wonders why a new coke plant needs to go on clean, beautiful farm land smack-dab in the middle of where people live.

“I know it’s a big investment,” he said. “But people have a lot invested here, too.”

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