Mania on the Moraine

Areglado presses the panic button on Whalerock wind proposal

Ron Areglado is very upset...but it's nothing that money won't cure

By Will Collette

There was an interesting op-ed in the Westerly Sun written by Ron Areglado who ran an unsuccessful campaign for Charlestown Town Council on the Charlestown Citizens Alliance (CCA Party) ticket. 

Areglado wrote, with considerable distress, about what he seems to believe is the impending court victory by developer Larry LeBlanc in the almost three-year long battle over LeBlanc’s proposed industrial wind farm which would be sited right on the Charlestown moraine.

Areglado thinks this would be terrible. In fact, so do I, but Areglado and I differ greatly both on the reasons for coming to that conclusion and on what to do about it.

From Fake Science, one of my favorite websites.

I’ve worked with NIMBY groups all over the country; that's what I did for a living for 25 years. These groups battled hazardous waste sites, garbage dumps, strip mines, massive lagoons for liquid pig manure and you name it. Often in such battles, a few members would get a little squirrelly and start spouting conspiracy claims and bogus science. These are distractions from the key factors that determine who wins these types of fights, namely finances and political power.

When conspiracies and fake science take over a NIMBY group, in my experience that’s when they start to lose. So it seems in Charlestown.

For a guy who’s supposed to be highly educated and very smart, Areglado seems to be obsessed with fake science. He is convinced that wind energy is evil because it causes an imaginary illness called “Wind Turbine Syndrome.” He cites the leading “authority” on the subject, a pediatrician named Nina Pierpont. Her laughable research on the subject has become gospel for the growing cohort of radical anti-wind power groups, even though it has been thoroughly debunked.

Hysteria and the "Nocebo Effect"

Click here to read the report of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health and Department of Environmental Protection. 

Their conclusion is that “Wind Turbine Syndrome,” such as it is, has more to do with anxiety and to a degree, public hysteria, than actual physiological effects. 

That hysteria is sometimes called the “nocebo effect” – click here from a new article on it in Slate. It’s the opposite of the placebo effect where the power of suggestion brings about relief; in the case of the nocebo effect, suggestion causes the perception of illness.

Areglado goes into detail about recent experiences Falmouth, MA has had with a pair of obsolete wind turbines they thought they were buying at bargain prices. They were, and are, bad turbines and they may have to be removed at great public expense. 

Portsmouth, RI faces a similar problem with its broken wind turbine (which was also obsolete when they bought it)[1].

It’s easy to take basic fact and cocoon it in fake science fiction[2]. Wind power seems to invite that kind of silly embellishment. 

Take for example some recent reaction from the Russian public to their recent meteor explosion. One commenter wrote to RT News (Russia’s equivalent of Voice of America): “Europe is to blame. They're using all those wind farms they are building to blow the planet off course, and deliberately tried to make Earth collide with this meteorite whilst it was over Russia. And it is the Bilderberg Illuminati who are behind all this.”

This comment sounds a lot like an anti-Semitic take-off on a spoof the Onion ran of a mock coal industry campaign that also argued that the use of wind energy was going to blow the Earth out of its orbit.

Slattery could show you his secret
files...but then he'd have to kill you

Dan Slattery's wind energy X-Files

My colleague Bob Yarnall[3], in his WTF Series, wrote in some detail about how the fight against Whalerock evolved and how early fake science about the health effects of wind power was actually planted in the group by none other than CCA Town Councilor Dan Slattery.

On several occasions, Slattery stated from the Council podium that he had vast amounts of research on wind power’s effect on health, but he has not made that research public. Like so many other Slattery claims, it’s much more dramatic to wave a handful of papers than to actually show people what’s on the paper. Sen.Joe McCarthy used that technique to great effect, too.

Anyway, instead of focusing on the impracticality, economics and environment, Areglado took a dive off the fake science springboard.

The Judge didn't buy it

In the first round of lawsuits where LeBlanc, the town, and local residents built a nest of tangled claims and counter-claims, RI Superior Court Judge Judith Savage eventually declared that all the differing parties’ lawsuits were crap and tossed all the cases out with sharp rebukes to each of the parties’ lawyers.

The Areglado suit was singled out by the judge for criticism for all the non-germane material that had been filed with the court, much of it on health effects. The judge rebuked the residents and their lawyers for wasting the court’s time. Read pages 38-39 of her decision where she says, among other things “The submission of this volume of material served only to delay this Court‘s review process and obfuscate the issues pending before it in these consolidated cases”.

All those lawsuits were then re-filed and are being heard by a different judge.

According to Areglado’s Sun op-ed, he says he believes the new judge will send the Whalerock matter to the Charlestown Zoning Board for them to decide whether to issue Whalerock with a Special Use Permit so they can proceed. Since the Zoning Board has already ruled in favor of Whalerock, that’s good news for LeBlanc and bad news for the rest of us.

So what does Areglado want you to do? From his op-ed piece, he wants you to tell the Town Council you oppose Whalerock. That's OK I suppose, but since the Town Council already opposes Whalerock and, in fact, is one of the litigants against Whalerock, that doesn’t seem like a good use of time.

Send money...operators are standing by

"Hi, I'm calling on behalf of the Ron Areglado Legal Defense Fund..."

And it looks like Areglado wants you to donate money to him to carry on more legal action. He ends his op-ed with this: “Thus far, a small group of citizens has taken on the burden of paying costly legal fees. Please contact me if you care to help in this battle.”

What Areglado doesn’t tell you is that the number of Ill Winders who are paying “those costly legal fees” dropped off significantly after Judge Savage’s decision, which I guess is why Areglado is making this pitch.

It seems to be in Ron Areglado’s nature to commit to long, expensive and futile litigation. It’s not just Whalerock – ask any member of the Sachem Passage Association about how their treasury was drained by futile lawsuits[4].

I think there are better ways to stop the Whalerock project than the choices Charlestown has made to date. We don’t need more pointless litigation. We didn’t need – and still don’t need – Charlestown’s draconian ban on all wind energy, including small residential windmills.

What will end the Whalerock soap opera once and for all is to give Larry LeBlanc what he has wanted all along – for the town to buy the land from him at a fair price, as LeBlanc believes he was promised when he bought the property at the behest of the Town Council. He gets his money. We get not only peace of mind but 81 acres of relatively unspoiled open space in a strategic location.

Click here to read the environmental argument for acquiring LarryLand as open space as made by Charlie Vandemoer, US Fish & Wildlife Manager for the Ninigret National Wildlife Refuge and RI’s other federal refuges.

LeBlanc has access to the same data that I have published here in Progressive Charlestown that shows the potential for commercial wind generators on land here in town is, at best, marginal. Areglado has access to this data, too. I believe, as do others in town, that Whalerock is not financially viable despite the “tax breaks and federal alternative energy subsidies” referred to in Areglado’s op-ed.

Those subsidies are (a) rapidly slipping away due to the budget fight between the President and the Republican Congress and (b) insufficient to make up the difference if there just isn’t enough wind to generate enough power.

Another reason to buy LarryLand

 Instead of writing checks to Areglado for more silly claims, let’s focus on what will end the long nightmare that 81 acres on the moraine has caused for this town. LeBlanc has shown that he is shrewd and relentless. He keeps coming with one undesirable project[5] after another for those 81 acres. He has just brought in a formerly silent partner in Connecticut in on the deal by signing a sale-leaseback deal with him for $2 million.

Click to enlarge - note the exact location of LarryLand

That peculiar sale-leaseback deal shows LeBlanc’s intent to keep pushing until we give in. Sooner or later, I think that’s exactly what we’re going to do. The longer we delay, the more will be spent on lawyers and more lawyers, as well as on anti-psychotics for the residents of Partridge Run.

I’ve already laid out five key reasons why we need to stop being stubbornly vain and begin negotiating with LeBlanc to not only end Whalerock but to also reduce the town’s anxieties over a Narragansett Indian casino. Click here to read my five reasons.

Since the new sale-leaseback deal signals a likely higher opening negotiating position for LeBlanc, Charlestown will need RIDEM’s help to make the deal. Charlestown still has unspent voter-approved local open space bond money and Rhode Island voters approved more open space funding for DEM.

Luckily, we still have the three-quarters of a million of Charlestown open space bond money that the CCA Party wanted to squander on “Y-Gate” - the purchase of the busted out YMCA camp.

I suggest that the energies of town residents, including Areglado and his dwindling band of Ill Winders, would be better spent focusing on the opportunity to take LarryLand as open space rather than planning some telethon or bake sales to finance Areglado lawsuits.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The main problem with older turbines is their gearbox drives. The newer designs feature direct drives that resolve most of the problems with the obsolete gearbox turbines. I’m also a fan of vertical axis turbines – click here for an example.

[2] If we really want to take on a noise issue that can make you crazy, how about traffic noise on Route One? We use fans to create masking white noise to blot out the sound. Given how loud Route One noise is to those of us who live nearby, would the Whalerock turbines, if they were to be built, actually be audible? I was in the middle of Ninigret Park after dark watching for Comet PANSTARRS and all I could hear was the Route One traffic.

[3] Best wishes go out to Bob who is on indefinite hiatus from Progressive Charlestown while he attends to the serious problems of his aging parents. Mazel Tov, Bob!

[4] Here’s an interesting footnote – to the extent that footnotes can be interesting: Larry LeBlanc’s lawyer is Nick Gorham. Nick Gorham is also the attorney for the Sachem Passage Association. This creates a rarely seen phenomenon where Gorham is opposing counsel in one Areglado lawsuit, but represents Areglado and the other SGA board matters in SGA’s extensive legal dealings.

[5] Over the years, LeBlanc has proposed to use his 81 acres to build a huge housing development, to sell to the Narragansett Tribe for use as a casino site, to build the wind farm or to build a smaller, affordable housing complex. He recently had his proposal for an RV camp for more than 200 vehicles rejected by the town of Westerly – don’t be surprised if he decides to add that to the mix here.