The crowd gathered to greet Mike Mazzei at the Mayes County Fairgrounds was dotted with teal “Stop the Inola Smelter” T-shirts.
Mazzei had secured President Donald Trump’s endorsement to be the next governor of Oklahoma just hours after publicly pledging his support for a massive aluminum smelter Trump wants built in Inola. Now he faced the difficult task of selling the project to a room full of Inola residents who made the 20-mile drive to Pryor for the Aug. 1 event.
The Mazzei campaign tried to assuage concerns about pollutants from the facility with a lengthy slide presentation. The smelter is part of Trump’s plan to revive aluminium production in the U.S. and strengthen national security. It’s projected to create about 1,000 direct, permanent jobs for the area, plus thousands more construction jobs. But ranchers around Inola are worried about pollution from the smelter harming their hay and cattle. Long term-fluoride exposure has been known to damage the teeth and bones of animals, causing lameness and dental problems.
“Particulate emissions must be put into perspective to understand the earth’s ability to clean itself,” one slide said, giving the millions of tons of gas and ash generated by the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens as one example. Another slide listed “THINGS THAT CONTAIN FLOURIDE” and was peppered with misspellings: “GRAPES & RAISENS,” “STAIN RESISTENAT CARPET” and “PHOSPHATE FERTALIZER.”
Oklahoma Primary Aluminum, a joint venture of United Arab Emirates-based Emirates Global Aluminium and Chicago-based Century Aluminum Company, has applied for a permit to emit a up to 1.02 pounds of total fluoride per ton of aluminum it produces from potlines at the Inola plant and another .02 pounds of total fluoride per ton from two anode bake furnaces. If approved, the limits on the permit would become the maximum amount the facility would be allowed to emit. That level is the maximum amount allowable under federal regulations.
The facility could generate up to 425 tons of fluoride emissions a year.
The Inola facility would be the biggest producing aluminum smelter in the U.S. once built and also the largest fluoride-emitting industrial plant in the nation, according to a report from one expert hired by the Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office, which opposes the project.
But Mazzei told the crowd that the facility would actually emit less than half of the maximum allowable amount — 0.45 pounds of fluoride per ton. He didn’t provide documentation for that figure but said it came from looking at other comparable facilities in Europe and the Middle East.
“I believe and know that this is a data point that is 100% solid, having been successfully achieved in other locations,” Mazzei said.
Oklahoma Primary Aluminum told The Frontier that it does believe the plant will operate below EPA emissions standards. The 0.45 figure Mazzei referenced likely came from Emirates Global Aluminium’s Al Taweelah plant in Abu Dhabi, “which is among the best-performing aluminum facilities in the world,” the company said in a statement. Oklahoma Primary Aluminum says it will use similar technology at the Inola plant.
But the Department of Environmental Quality said the actual amount of emissions at the Inola plant would depend on production rates, control equipment performance and hours of operation. The agency is still in the process of evaluating Oklahoma Primary Aluminum’s application.
A campaign flyer for the Mayes County event promised Mazzei would answer “every question asked by the public.” But the campaign asked attendees to write their questions on index cards, which were then pre-screened.
Inola resident Chris Roam was skeptical of the Mazzei campaign’s claims.
“To come to a candidate forum like this, where they’re just spouting the most ridiculous things, it is insulting, it is frustrating,” she said.
Five days after the town hall in Pryor, Roam followed up with an email to Mazzei’s campaign manager, his brother Dan Mazzei. She wrote that she was troubled that much of the campaign’s information about emissions seemed to come from Oklahoma Primary Aluminum.
“They are not a reliable source for information,” Roam wrote. “They want to build a smelter and produce aluminum at a profit. Their verbal assurances are worthless. Whatever they plan to do must be in writing.”
She said Dan Mazzei responded two weeks later saying the email got lost in his inbox and that he would get back to her soon.
A bump from Trump
Mazzei’s opponent in the runoff, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, is suing to block the smelter project, claiming it would be a public nuisance and pollute air, groundwater and pastures. “Right now we’re seeing a tax incentive package of a billion dollars for a Mid-East aluminum plant that’s only had to promise us a thousand jobs.”
Trump called Drummond a “fake Republican” in a post on Truth Social one week ahead of Election Day.
“….he wants to dethrone a magnificent, Job producing, desperately needed, and brand new, Aluminum Plant that will be one of the best projects ever conceived or built, not only in the Great State of Oklahoma, but in the United States, itself. It will be one of the most successful Job creating Plants ever built in our Country,” Trump wrote, again urging Oklahomans to vote for Mazzei.
Drummond’s campaign manager Matt Parker never expected Mazzei to make it this far in the race. Before Trump’s endorsement, Mazzei was critical of smelter project, saying at a candidate forum in March that he didn’t support the large government incentives the project was getting.
“Right now we’re seeing a tax incentive package of a billion dollars for a Mid-East aluminum plant that’s only had to promise us a thousand jobs,” Mazzei said.
Parker believes some of Mazzei’s upward trajectory since that time goes to Republican political strategist and Trump ally Roger Stone, whom Mazzei has hired as a consultant.
“He made a very wise choice to hire Roger Stone, who has the ear of Trump,” Parker said. “He flip-flopped on the smelter and got the Trump endorsement.”
Stone told The Frontier in a text message that Mazzei earned Trump’s endorsement by being the best candidate.
“The idea that you can “buy” the Presidents’ endorsement for $67,000 (or any amount) is absurd,” Stone wrote.
Mazzei’s campaign has paid Stone’s consulting firm $82,500 through Aug. 10, according to campaign filings.
“I know nothing whatsoever about the aluminum plant and it never entered into any discussion that I had with anyone in the president’s political operation,” Stone told The Frontier.
Mazzei told The Frontier that he had an interview in the West Wing of the White House with a senior Trump official in April that helped him secure Trump’s endorsement.
“The thing that people don’t understand about these presidential endorsements? It’s a process of vetting that goes on for months, months, months, and months, and months,” he said.
Mazzei said he decided to support the smelter after receiving more information from the Trump Administration about the financial, national security and environmental safety aspects of the project.
He said he was “pleasantly surprised” to get Trump’s endorsement two weeks before the Republican primary.
The president’s endorsement hasn’t helped much in other recent gubernatorial races, said Oklahoma-based pollster Pat McFerron.
Trump-backed candidates for governor in Minnesota, Iowa, South Carolina and Georgia all lost their primaries this year.
But Trump’s blessing could still make a difference in Oklahoma’s tight race. A survey of 600 likely runoff voters completed Aug. 6 by Cole Hargrave Snodgrass & Associates found Drummond and Mazzei both polling at 44%, with many voters still undecided.
Among the 38% of likely voters who described themselves as “Trump Republicans,” 62% supported Mazzei, with only 22% supporting Drummond.
Unanswered questions
Mazzei reiterated at a Republican Women’s Club of South Tulsa event in Bixby on Monday that Oklahomans had nothing to fear from the smelter and that he believes Trump cares about keeping Oklahoma safe.
Mazzei again took pre-screened questions from the audience. He said he plans to require nearby air, water and soil around the facility to be collected and monitored by a third party, based on a similar program for a smelter in Iceland. Mazzei did not elaborate on how a third-party monitoring program would work or be enforced.
“The people of Oklahoma, and of course the people of Inola and Rogers County and Mayes County, can have 100% confidence that the water and the air will be completely safe for the people, completely safe for the cattle, and completely safe for the farms,” Mazzei said.
Julie Flathers, of Inola, came to the Monday event and afterward asked Mazzei about some of his statements on the smelter, though he ended the conversation after a couple of minutes to greet others standing in line to talk to him.
“I think it’s disappointing that Mike will not have an open discussion where he will hear our side,” Flathers said. “I’ve been to two of these events so far where there was supposed to have been discussion about the smelter, and he takes very … curated questions. And he continues to say a lot of untrue things.”
Flathers said she did not come away from the event as a new Mazzei supporter.
Asked why she thought Mazzei changed his mind on the smelter, Flathers replied: “Because of the Trump endorsement. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
After the event, Mazzei refused to answer questions from The Frontier about the Inola smelter or why he cancelled a town hall that had been planned for that evening in Rogers County, where the facility would be located.
A campaign spokesperson later said that the event had been cancelled because of a scheduling conflict and that it would likely be rescheduled in the fall — after the runoff election.
Frontier editor Dylan Goforth contributed to this story.