Arizona Communities Bank On Trump's Push For Coal To Ensure They're Not Forgotten

Brantley Baird never misses a chance to talk history, from how his great-grandmother helped settle the town of Snowflake long before Arizona was granted statehood to tales of riding to school bareback and tethering his horse outside the one-room schoolhouse.

His family worked the land and raised livestock, watching the railroad come and go and cattle empires rise and fall. Then came the coal-fired power plants, built throughout northern Arizona and northwestern New Mexico to power progress in distant Western cities.

The plants would play their own role in the history of the region and could wind up at the center of its uncertain future.

The Cholla Power Plant stands just down the road from where Baird, 88, has been building a museum to showcase covered wagons, weathered farm implements and other remnants of frontier days. For years the plant powered the local economy, providing jobs and tax revenues for the unincorporated community of Joseph City, its schools and neighboring towns, but now the vapors from its stacks have dissipated.

These days, change is in the air. Cholla is the latest in a long line of U.S. coal-fired plants to retire, shutting down in March. Arizona Public Service said it had become too costly to operate due to strict environmental regulations. The mandates were aimed at reining in coal-burning utilities, long viewed by scientists as major contributors to warming the planet.