An Old Wind Law ( 2006) A New Wind Law (2012) - Are There Any Relationships?

Sometimes I like to go back through my old wind research files and see what might be relevant to today.  Thinking about zoning which we are going through right now in Cape Vincent and the debate whether we can prohibit wind turbines, I dug out the old 2006 draft wind law amendment from June 28, 2006.  There is some interesting stuff in this old law.  This is also the law that the Rienbeck board  killed and then told Edsall to adopt as guidelines for site plan review of the wind projects.  A sort of  a“backdoor zoning law without the fuss or muss. And the amazement of some Edsall even made Acciona agree to abide by these” guidelines”  Right up until they all figured out it said turbines were not utilities and the sound clause would have killed their project.  Then they were stepping all over themselves to ignore the “guidelines and say they were never adopted.  A complete lie!!!  I have the minutes of the planning board guidelines adoption.

Page one…. in this law wind turbines were not considered utilities. That was before the old town board killed this law and decided a specific wind law wasn’t needed, they would just call then utilities to expedite the process for the wind developers. There is even a list of things they consider utilities and wind turbines is not there.  Now why is this important.  Well because WPEG had a law suit over this issue whether turbines are utilities after they killed this law.  I sent this law to our lawyer and told him how important it was, since it showed that at one point the town did not think wind turbines were utilities and even drafted a law saying so at one time . He agreed.  But suddenly and arbitrarily the board  said  turbines are utilities !  I observed our lawyer argue this point in court.  Problem was he never entered the law into the court record as well as our comp plan that said the town wanted to discourage towers and utilities in the Ag district.  Kind of important stuff.  We lost and when we went to appeal the appeals lawyers badly wanted these documents in the case, so I forwarded them to those lawyers too.  But these documents were refused by the appeals court because the original lawyer had not included them in the record.  Which goes to my point made in other places…the experts and the lawyers don’t always get it right, and this was a pretty big screw up!!!

Look on page 3 by my notation arrow the sound clause.   5dba above ambient at the property lines of parcels not under lease.   This one still has me scratching my head since if you use the actual ambient  background in CV this would have been a project killer, unless of course the wind companies where going to jack up the ambient…which is exactly what they did.  But even so how did this get in a law that was under a heavily pro wind board at that time. I wonder if they even knew  the implications of this sound clause?

There are some interesting setbacks in this law and now we all know better!!!

But what really jumped out at me was on page 2 Section 300 and 310 Lake Front and River Front Districts.

E.  Prohibited uses   I had to look again to make sure I saw it right…  PROHIBITED

Oh my God…there was that terrible word  prohibit!!!   Now this was a very pro wind board at that time and even they were willing to prohibit, which we can’t get this board to even consider. I thought we couldn’t  prohibit anything…yet a very pro wind board did.

Apparently somebody on this wind law committee backed by the County, since they helped on this law and you can see their header at the top of the pages, apparently they had no problem with PROHIBITING turbines in the Lake and River Districts. Get it… prohibiting.  Now one might say “yeah but they allowed them in the rest of the town.”  True, but from a wind developer’s point of view the Lake and River Districts are where the best wind is, and thus the best money from production, and the town was telling them they were prohibited from those locations. Can you imagine that???   And they didn’t use any research and science as to why turbines were prohibited.  Not birds or sound etc etc. I am pretty sure this was simply a straight forward aesthetic judgment to keep the turbines back from the Lake and River.  Now there is a concept, even thought it would do little for visual mitigation, and we should be preserving the interior veiwshed as well..

Now I watched the pro wind lawyers in court try to make the case that turbines are utilities and should go anywhere in town.  They claimed the developer had no choice and had to be where the best wind was available.  My thought was …really… then why don’t you (Acciona) have any proposals for turbines right out in Lake District if you have to be where the best wind is like your lawyers are claiming.   Why are most of your turbines inland away from the best wind?  The Acciona  wind managers had no real answer for that, and they were not really happy when I took a good long look at their wind contour map on the wall in the their office that clearly showed the wind was by the Lake. 

Now another argument could be that, well we didn’t have Article X back then. True, but the wind companies are the real problem and that does not take away the fact that they could have sued because the wind law was too restrictive and cut them out of the best wind in the town…but this wind law tried to prohibit them there anyhow.

 It’s a little scary when you see our previous board almost making more sense on this prohibit issue than our current board!

Can you imagine that…prohibiting wind turbines in the best wind resources in town!!!