Our friends at Clean Up the River Environment celebrated the good work of Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy lawyer Beth Goodpaster in fighting the Big Stone II by awarding her the CURE River Keeper Tokheim Stoneware Plate.

Goodpaster safely transported the beautiful plate from the Hollywood Theater in Montevideo to MCEA’s St. Paul office where it now resides. Goodpaster also took some swings at a Big Stone II pinata with a Minnesota Wild hockey stick. When she broke it apart, bags of chocolate kisses, licorice “crows” and Beanie Babies were set free and distributed to the crowd of nearly 300 people.

The River Keeper award is presented annually to an individual or organization that exemplifies exceptional commitment to the Minnesota River. The folks at CURE, a grassroots organization that celebrates and works to restore the upper Minnesota River, were strong allies in the fight to keep the coal-fired power plant from being built on the South Dakota shore of  Big Stone Lake, the source of the Minnesota River.

“Beth was outmanned by a throng of high paid corporate lawyers who put extreme pressure on the Public Utilities Commmission to approve the controversial plant’s certificate of need,” CURE board member Brian Wojtalewicz told the crowd at the Feb. 20 gathering. “A lot was put on her shoulders and in the end, it was her convincing arguments on the need for conditions to protect consumers from the rising cost of coal power that prevented the plant from getting the financing it needed to be constructed.”

For her part, Goodpaster thanked CURE and the clients she represented in the fight against Big Stone II. Those clients were MCEA, Fresh Energy, Izaak Walton League of America, Union of Concerned Scientists and Wind on the Wires.

“I’ve been thinking about the lessons we learned and what we learned was not to give up,” Goodpaster told the audience.

The legal battle against the proposed 600-megawatt power plant began in 2005 and did not end until the remaining four utilities, from an initial seven, conceded in the fall that they could not obtain financing for the plant, despite having all the needed permits.