Breaking News: Whalerock and LeBlanc win

Town and Areglado Ill Winders Lose

We need to get serious about acquiring the 81 acres
for open space to end this drama

By Will Collette

The anticipated decision in the complex array of lawsuits over the proposed Whalerock industrial wind farm was issued today by RI Superior Court Judge Kristin Rodgers.

It’s bad news for the town of Charlestown and the group of neighbors who filed suit to block the project. It’s great news for Whalerock and developer Larry LeBlanc (and his silent partner, James Barrows of Brooklyn, Connecticut).

Read the 47 page decision in its entirety by clicking here.

In this decision, the judge granted Whalerock’s motion to dismiss Ron Areglado et. al.’s challenge, the Town’s challenge and ruled the Planning Commission has no more than an advisory role to play (no matter what Planning Commissar Ruth Platner may think).

Judge Rodgers has remanded Whalerock’s application for a special use permit directly to the Charlestown Zoning Board for one final review on the merits. Zoning has already approved the Whalerock project, twice, which was the action that led to all of the lawsuits that were decided today. It is unlikely that the law that governs the Zoning Board's decision-making or circumstances involved in this case will have changed before they consider Whalerock’s application for the third and probably final time.

Judge Rodgers also explicitly states that “no further review or action of the Planning Commission is necessary prior to review of Whalerock‘s application for a special use permit by the Zoning Board.”

Despite LeBlanc’s judicial clean sweep and the ass-whooping the town and the Areglado plaintiffs took, the construction of Whalerock is not a foregone conclusion. The economics of wind energy have changed radically since the start of the Whalerock saga.

US Energy Dept. data shows that Whalerock probably would not
be commercially viable. More recent URI data backs that up.

Wind data for the site still make it an iffy proposition, one that will be hard to fund. Land-based industrial turbines are unpopular, and not just in Charlestown, so don’t expect LeBlanc to hold a ground-breaking anytime soon.

The CCA Party is holding a workshop on Friday evening that was supposed to revolve around one of the two dozen or so families in Falmouth, MA who think that town’s wind turbines are making them sick. 

Those claims have been studied and dismissed by the Massachusetts Department of Health.

The Falmouth wind turbines are bad turbines. Obsolete technology bought for cheap at the rough equivalent of a wind energy thrift shop. But even though there have been lots of complaints from those turbines’ neighbors, last night the residents of Falmouth in their town meeting rejected the proposal to remove the turbines. This outcome was a shock to the turbine opponents.

The Whalerock project is a bad project. However, health effects, real or imagined, are only a small part of it. At its core, this fight is about money. It's about economics. 

It makes no sense for Charlestown or even for LeBlanc, given the economics. But perhaps this legal setback will make it crystal clear that we damn well better get into serious negotiations about buying his 81 acres and permanently setting aside that prime real estate as open space once and for all. Click here to read my Five Reasons why we need to buy LarryLand.

And maybe it’s time for the CCA Party and the Ill Winders to quit fooling around with specious claims about health effects and focus on how to take those 81 acres off the table by preserving that land as open space.