Editor’s note: This commentary is by Frank Seawright, the chair of the Windham Selectboard.
[O]ur little town, Windham, continues to struggle to regain its equilibrium four months after the town’s voters defeated, in a referendum held on Election Day, a proposal to place the state’s largest industrial wind plant in our midst. The wind developer abandoned the project after the referendum, which the developer’s representatives both demanded and designed. These folks have moved on, no doubt glad to forget all about the recalcitrant voters of Windham. But feelings continue to run high among some of the townspeople they left behind. Two recent events revived some of the old bad feelings.
I hope that Vermont’s leaders, who are themselves denizens of small communities, will consider the lasting effect of the state’s unreasonable encouragement of industrial scale renewable energy in unsuitable locations.
Shortly before Town Meeting Day, the landowner, who had sought the wind project for its income stream, appeared to encourage overtures from other wind developers, keeping alive the controversy over whether such a project belongs here. And around the same time, the Vermont Public Service Board (PSB) proposed new turbine-noise guidelines with noise levels more protective than those currently in effect in Vermont, and akin to European standards. The PSB also proposed setbacks of 10 times the height of the turbine, vindicating the position taken by the majority of the Windham Selectboard during our long engagement with the wind developer. Our position was and remains that the siting proposed for our town is the most inappropriate in Vermont. In addition to serious environmental concerns, the proposed project would have exposed some 100 Windham families to at least one, and in many cases, several turbines, placed too close to us. We knew it from our research, and now apparently, the PSB knows it too. But the project’s supporters in our town, many of whom live at the greatest distances from proposed turbine sites, refused to listen to us. Their deafness to our concerns helped create the conditions for resentment: They seemed heartlessly to care more about the promises of the developer than the wrenching apprehension of the too-close families. The saber-rattling of the landowner, coupled with the PSB’s determination about how close is too close, revived some of our old sadness and anger, causing a certain amount of invective to fly among the people who live here.
In truth, it is probably unlikely that another wind developer will take a whack at Windham. Prior to the vote, the landowner, the developer and the developer’s public relations firm worked our town over pretty thoroughly, using an array of techniques from simple deception to direct payment to voters if the project received a majority of “yes” votes. Even so, the voter turnout was 92 percent and about 65 percent voted against the proposal. Adding to this the PSB’s proposed rule, you might think that Windham property owners would not have to face the wind-turbine threat again. And while you might be right, still, it’s upsetting that the Vermont Public Interest Research Group is frantically lobbying to blunt the changes to the noise rule proposed by the PSB. To my mind, they are battling to assist the wind industry to continue to assault Vermont communities and propose projects that will hurt Vermonters.
Because these activities do hurt us: the damage to communities like ours that is created in the run-up to a misguided wind project is bad; it is also long lasting. I hope that Vermont’s leaders, who are themselves denizens of small communities, will consider the lasting effect of the state’s unreasonable encouragement of industrial scale renewable energy in unsuitable locations. For while you may think that your community is strong enough to get through such a difficult time and then quickly pick up and continue as though nothing ever happened, I’m not so sure. The bitterness tends to linger. I don’t know how to advise anyone on this and can only observe that whatever sense of “community” you believe you have may not be as durable as you think.
