Forced to Choose Between a Job — and a Community

As the largest employer in Adams County, Ohio, closes its coal-fired power plants there, politicians and companies have thrown up their hands. Families know that finding work means leaving the place they know.

by Alec MacGillis May 23, 6 a.m. EDT

This story was co-published with Bloomberg BusinessWeek.

John Arnett chose Adams County, Ohio, as his home long before he was old enough to vote, drink beer or drive a motorcycle along the Ohio River. After his parents split up, Arnett opted at age 10 to spend most of his time with his grandmother in Adams County, along the river 70 miles southeast of Cincinnati, rather than with his parents in the Dayton area. He liked life on the tobacco farm his grandfather had bought after retiring early from General Motors Co. in Dayton. And his grandmother, who became a widow when her husband died in a tractor accident, welcomed the companionship.

After high school, Arnett joined the U.S. Marine Corps, in 1999. His unit, the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines — the storied Suicide Charley — took him to the other side of the world: South Korea, Japan, Thailand. In the spring of 2003 he was an infantryman in the invasion of Iraq, spending five months in country — Baghdad, Tikrit, Najaf. ... Once back in Ohio, he settled in Adams County with his future wife, Crystal, and started taking classes in criminal justice at the University of Cincinnati, figuring he’d follow the well-worn path from the military to law enforcement. One day, though, Crystal alerted him to an ad in the paper for jobs right in Adams County, at the coal-fired power plants down on the river. He jumped at the chance. The Dayton Power & Light Co. plants had been there for years — the larger, 2,400-megawatt J.M. Stuart Station, opened in 1970 as one of the largest in the country, and the 600-megawatt Killen Station followed 12 years later, 14 miles to the east — and weren’t going anywhere: Ohio was getting 80 percent of its electricity from burning coal.

Arnett started out in 2004 making $12 an hour, handling heavy machinery in the yard where the coal was offloaded from barges coming up the river from mines in southern Indiana and Illinois. He soon moved inside the plant, operating the boiler and turbines, and finally became an operator chemist in charge of monitoring water quality, making about $38 per hour. He got active in the union that represented the plants’ 380 hourly employees, Local 175 of the Utility Workers Union of America; eventually he was elected its vice president. He and his wife started a family and in 2009 bought a larger home, a repossessed rancher they got for $130,000, in Manchester, the community nearest to Stuart. Occasionally he still got out for rides on his Harley, but life was taken over by family and youth sports, which was fine with him. He liked how he could call up his sister-in-law to watch his kids on a snow day when he was at the plant and his wife was in classes for her physical therapy degree. He liked how, at high school football games, he could send his 7-year-old off to buy himself a hot dog. “I can look over to the concession stand and I’ll know someone over there,” he said.

In mid-November of 2016, a few days after the election of Donald Trump, the president of Local 175, Greg Adams, called Arnett with news: Dayton Power & Light, which had been bought in 2011 by the global energy company AES Corp., had notified the state that it intended to close Stuart and Killen in June 2018. The plants were by far the largest employer and taxpayer in Adams County, population 28,000, which by one measure of median family income is the poorest county in Ohio. The announcement left the county with just a year and change to figure out how it was going to make do without them.
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Alec MacGillis covers politics and government for ProPublica.

Alec.MacGillis@propublica.org

@AlecMacGillis