FRANKFORT — Legislation to bring “merchant” power plants under state regulation has a significant flaw, its leading proponent in the House said Wednesday.

        Further complicating matters, the legislation became entangled with another hot utility topic — giving local governments the power to decide where cellular telephone towers can be built.

        It was uncertain Wednesday whether the bill would come to a vote in the House. Majority Leader Greg Stumbo, who almost single-handedly decides such matters, seemed ambivalent. “Nobody in my district is really that much concerned about it,” Mr. Stumbo, D-Prestonsburg, said.

        The uncertainty was dispiriting to Rep. Jon Draud, who took on the issue after Cinergy Corp. proposed to build an electricity plant near his mother's nursing home.

        The current version of the legislation, after amendments by a House committee Tuesday, would allow the Public Service Commission to assess utility plant sites. It could order the utility to take steps to mitigate a plant's effects on neighbors. But the commission could not veto a site, and that could be a fatal flaw, Mr. Draud said in an interview.

        Officials of the PSC say the no-veto clause created a loophole that would allow Cincinnati-based Cinergy to do the very thing that motivated Mr. Draud in the first place — build a gas-fired electrical generator at its natural-gas distribution site in Northern Kentucky.

        Mr. Draud, R-Crestview Hills, said the generator would be about 600 feet from the nursing home where his mother lives. Mr. Draud said the PSC wants him to try to get the House to amend the bill to eliminate the no-veto clause. “I just want to get a bill,” Mr. Draud said.

        The focus of the bill was not on utilities, which are regulated by the PSC, but on merchant plants, which are unregulated because they sell power on the open market. Gov. Paul Patton put a moratorium on permits after 29 applications — all but four for merchant plants — were filed last year.

        Though Mr. Draud got a bill through the House, the legislation at issue is from the Senate — a separate bill by Republican Sen. Ernie Harris of Crestwood.

        Mr. Harris is chairman of the Senate Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee, where a cell-tower bill passed by the House 81-8 has languished. The bill's sponsor, Rep. Steve Riggs, D-Louisville, said he intended to “piggyback” his legislation as an amendment to Mr. Harris' bill.

        Mr. Harris said he was not opposed to that idea.

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