By DOUGLAS HABERMAN - DOUG.HABERMAN@LATIMES.COM

CHINO HILLS -- While state officials in Sacramento try to get new power plants built and online, officials here worry that a proposed plant's potential environmental impacts on their city could be ignored in the rush to ease California's energy crunch.

Earlier this week, Chino Hills officials sent a letter to the California Energy Commission in Sacramento outlining the city's concerns about fast-tracking the proposed plant at the California Institution for Men in neighboring Chino.

Mayor Ed Graham said he worries that along with the 180 megawatts of electricity that the plant's gas powered turbines are supposed to produce, it could also generate air pollution, noise and traffic that would diminish the quality of life for the city's 60,000 residents.

"We'd like to make sure our concerns are at least heard and put on record," Graham said.

Officials in Chino have questions about some of the same issues raised by their counterparts in Chino Hills, according to City Manager Glen Rojas, who said residents in his city have more right to be concerned about the plant than their neighbors in Chino Hills, which is more than a mile from the plant's proposed site.

Rojas said executives with the company behind the project, Pegasus Power Partners, a subsidiary of New Jersey-based Delta Power Co., have been working with Chino to address the environmental issues and alleviate any concerns.

"Pegasus and Delta have been extremely cooperative," Rojas said, adding that the company has agreed to buy air quality credits from the South Coast Air Quality Management District that executives told him would actually improve the air quality in the Chino Basin.

"We're making sure that we're looking out for the community's best interest," Rojas said.

Delta Power's president, Dean Vanech, said the issues that Chino Hills officials raise are reasonable, adding that his company has operated plants in much more environmentally sensitive areas than Chino.

"We are very used to working in cooperation with the local communities and we will be very sensitive to their concerns," he said.

Perhaps the people with the most right to be concerned about the power plant are the staff and inmates at the prison where the plant will be built.

Lt. T.J. Padilla, a prison spokesman, said the administration there is not worried about the new plant, which will join a much smaller existing plant that produces 27 megawatts of electricity, some of it used by the prison.

"It hasn't been any problem whatsoever, so we don't anticipate any problems from this plant," Padilla said.

Chino Hills City Manager Doug La Belle said the city is not opposed to the new plant, but wants to ensure that it does not harm the region's air quality in exchange for a quick boost to the state's power supply.

"There's some urgency to do this, but you don't want to trade one priority for another," La Belle said.

Rob Schlichting, a spokesman for the California Energy Commission, said that the commission is preparing its assessment of the Pegasus project. The commission is scheduled to decide June 6 whether the plant will be approved.

Schlichting said he had not seen the letter from Chino Hills, but said the concerns raised in the letter are those that the commission will consider in making its decision.

"The whole goal of this project is to get power on line without harming the environment or air quality," he said.

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