Editor’s note: Rich Carbonetti is owner of Round Top Woodlot Management Co. He lives in Albany.
I want to be clear this is not a statement for or against the Lowell wind project. I have an enormous amount of respect for those who are thoughtfully supporting or challenging the role of industrial wind energy in our state’s energy future.
Rather, I want to discuss why we have found ourselves in this situation from a planning standpoint. In cases where land use and environmental issues are at stake, there are almost always critical points that we can look back on that could have changed the present situation.
Particularly I want to discuss how two people at the heart of the wind tower matter, Don and Shirley Nelson, helped to fight the very process that could have stopped the wind towers—town planning. I do this because it is important to evaluate how we got here, so that maybe we can do things differently in the future. I also believe the whole story needs to be told, because a lot of people have sympathized with and supported the Nelsons, and before sympathy and support are freely given I think it is important that all the facts are out for everyone to judge for themselves.
Here is the history: In the 1980s, the Vermont Legislature passed Act 200. This bill was designed to promote local and regional planning efforts. Included in Act 200 were funds available to communities in the form of grants that could fund resource assessments and ultimately the development of town or regional plans. At the time, I had recently moved to Albany and as a forester with knowledge of resource issues I was asked to serve with several other residents to look into Act 200 funding for our town. Well, to our surprise Albany was awarded the very first planning grant in Vermont. Mind you, this grant was only to provide funding for a community study of the resources in town such as: forests, wildlife, recreation, and agriculture as well as to determine how our town’s residents valued these resources.
Almost immediately a revolt formed against any planning efforts at all in Albany, as well as in many other NEK towns. A group developed called Citizens for Private Property Rights or something like that. In Albany this group’s efforts were spearheaded in part by Don and Shirley Nelson (despite the fact that they live in Lowell!). The Nelsons even had a float in our annual Labor Day parade extolling the absolute rights of private property owners.
Those of us supporting the grant’s purpose—and planning in general—were labeled “flatlanders” who only wanted to take away the rights of locals to do what they saw fit with their private property. When the rhetoric was at a high pitch we asked opponents of planning whether or not they were concerned that maybe their neighbor might choose a use for their land that was inappropriate like starting a junk yard or dump, or even some industrial plant. In response they called us alarmists and accused us of supporting our vision for Vermont at the expense of private property rights.
Then about 15 years later, I was involved in an effort to stop liquidation timber cutting in Vermont. I worked with three other foresters and many interested parties to pass Act 15, the Heavy Cut Law.
In response an opposition group called POST (Property Owners Standing Together) formed. Guess who joined POST and posted their land due to this alleged incursion on private property rights. You guessed it, the Nelsons and a number of their supporters. Again they were vocal opponents of the idea that their right to do with their land as they saw fit would be negatively impacted by the government and by community planning.
By now I hope all this talk of GMP trampling on the “poor” Nelsons should sound a bit silly. Now that the value of Nelsons’ farm has—in their mind— been negatively impacted by Trip Wileman’s use of HIS property “as he sees fit” it seems that Trip’s private property rights are not so important to the Nelsons. This strikes me as wanting to have your cake and eat it too. In the 1980s and 90s the Nelsons argued that everyone should have the right to do with their property as they see fit, but now that it might harm them they want to restrict Trip’s property rights. Suddenly the Nelson’s are concerned, as we predicted they would be way back when, that there is a land use on an adjoining parcel that could negatively impact them! What a concept.
Also, I wonder if the Nelsons have honestly informed all of you supporting them that they fought not once but TWICE to insure that Trip would have the right to do with his land as he sees fit.
In the end, we could have had a thoughtful process in our town and across Vermont that would have considered what these ridgelines mean to us, and what should and should not be done on the ridgelines of Vermont. But this process became impossible when the Nelsons, and many other NEK residents, fought planning tooth and nail. At that time they apparently put their property rights above the rights of all of us to determine the future of the NEK and Vermont and now they are paying the price.
I would also like to see the journalists covering this story do more than simply present the narrative that the Nelsons are being railroaded by GMP. Hopefully the history of planning in Albany makes clear that the real story is the missed opportunity that residents of the NEK and all of Vermont had to identify these unique ridgelines as valuable resources in need of protecting. Maybe the Chronicle should investigate how many of those speaking out against the wind towers voted to send the planning money back in the 1980s. Those voting results could go a long way to understanding why those questioning the validity and value of industrial wind now have very little say in the process. In the 1980s we argued that something like this could happen if we didn’t institute some form of planning, but people like Don and Shirley argued that any infringement on property rights is bad. Well, under that logic Mr. Wileman owns his land and he should have the right to use it as he desires.
So for those of you trudging up the mountain above my home in Albany, ask the Nelsons next time why they have changed from virulent opponents of thoughtful planning to neighbors somehow wronged by the very rights they sought so strongly to protect.
All I have to say to those of you who pilloried planning and the Heavy Cut law, what goes around comes around. In the end we often get exactly what we deserve when we forget that we should be a society of we and not a society of me.
