Editor’s note: This commentary is by Nancy Tips, who is a member of Friends of Windham.
[M]any people in the towns of Windham and Grafton are crying foul, as we read about Iberdrola’s offer to reward our towns’ registered voters with an annual check, contingent on our communities’ “yes” vote for their wind-turbine project on Election Day.
We read that this vote-buying scheme was the brainchild of a secret Windham negotiating group, a claim that is incidentally at odds with what Iberdrola reps have told Montpelier insiders. But let’s not quibble about this proposition’s delightful parentage. Far more astonishing is its vaunted purpose, as told to The Chester Telegraph by Kathy Scott, a Windham resident who claims to be one of its creators. That purpose is to attract busloads of youngsters, who would turn up in Windham and rent homes in order get their mitts on that Iberdrola bonus. Super-charged by their lovely surroundings and an annual check from Iberdrola, they will commence churning out offspring to populate the struggling elementary school.
Ouch. Somebody call the weird-logic police, ’cause I got a couple of questions.
How, exactly, does the promise of an annual payment, likely to top out at $2,000 a year for a working couple, and made by a tottering corporation with no ties to the community, promote sustainable prosperity for Windham’s working families, young or otherwise, now or in the future?
Iberdrola appears to dismiss the town’s right to decide how revenue is spent, while simultaneously removing any link between potential harms caused by its project and compensation for those harms.
Why would a tiny Vermont town suddenly become a magnet for the average young person who, we might safely imagine, lacks the number one reason that anyone would ever move here? Namely, a complex and painful love of this place that is so nourishing that you put up with a long commute to a difficult, low-paying job through endless snow and slush. And then black fly season.
For a measly couple of grand? Let us dismiss these shallow and hokey imaginings.
Except that we can’t. While Ms Scott’s notion of the purpose of this scheme may be hokum, Iberdrola’s most definitely is not. Iberdrola’s purpose is to banish community planning and leadership from the renewable energy equation, because it gets in their way.
Originally, Iberdrola offered the towns a payment in lieu of taxes or PILOT, widely thought to be the best option for communities in our situation because it helps us to avoid annual litigation over how much tax the corporation will have to pay. The PILOT could reasonably have been seen as compensation to the community for harms caused by the wind project: harms to the region, to the community, and to individuals. The communities would have voted on distribution of the PILOT in its entirety, recognizing and deliberating on the full spectrum of consequences of the mammoth installation. Community planning and leadership would have played no small part.
Iberdrola’s new proposal replaces the PILOT with a system of their own devising, including un-auditable funds and a frank bribe for individual registered voters. In a stroke, Iberdrola appears to dismiss the town’s right to decide how revenue is spent, while simultaneously removing any link between potential harms caused by its project and compensation for those harms. Instead, Iberdrola plans to pay part of people’s taxes, and to distribute rewards to favored community groups and to cooperative individuals, based on secret corporate decision making and without pesky community scrutiny or input. Compensation for actual community harm disappears, and accordingly, those harms simply vanish into thin air. In Iberdrola’s book, that is.
This is not exactly the world we thought we’d inherited from our forebears. We thought we had a birthright to public leadership and to shared community ethics. Actually, many of us still think so, and it seems unlikely that Iberdrola will get away with their hostile takeover of our towns. On Nov. 8, we’ll find out whether or not Iberdrola can buy our elections and our towns.
