The Charlestown Citizens Alliance (CCA) is honing its message for the first reading tonight at the Town Council meeting of the historic ban on all wind-to-energy devices, whether industrial scale or on a homeowner’s rooftop, anywhere in town.
READ THE ORDINANCE YOURSELF. Key provision: "No Wind Energy Facility or Wind Turbine of any sort or nature is permitted in any zoning district located in the Town. Such uses are prohibited uses in all zoning areas."
We have come to this point because of runaway NIMBY hysteria triggered by Larry LeBlanc’s proposed Whalerock wind turbines, mixed in with a healthy dash of greed. Add opportunism from the CCA who have disregarded their own 2009 poll results. Incidentally, LeBlanc is also expected to be at tonight's meeting.
The result is an unscientific plunge into radical NIMBYism where, in an attempt to ban industrial-sized wind turbines, the CCA's wholly-owned subsidiary, the Charlestown Planning Commission, is asking the Town Council to ban any device that converts wind into electricity (that's the definition in the ordinance).
The CCA Planning Commissions actually discussed the political fall-out that might come from this radical move at their July 27 meeting. Planning Commissar Ruth Platner stressed the importance of “educating” the public about the ban and what it means. Watch the video on Clerkbase and judge for yourself (especially from the 2:30 mark on).
The key CCA talking point is that this is not a permanent ban, It’s just a good faith effort to buy time. In short order, the town will come up with another ordinance to accommodate home owners who want wind power for their home use. And if you spread it on your garden, it will make your flowers bloom.
Typically, the Planning Commission takes five years or more to come up with ordinance language for far simpler and less controversial issues as this (e.g. the Dark Skies ordinance). And the CCA Planning Commission is divided on the topic with some of the more radical members (e.g. Kathryn O’Connor) wanting to stick with a total ban.
But the message from the CCA is now clear and we saw it today in a one-sided Westerly Sun “news” story, a Westerly Sun Letter to the Editor from Ruth Platner, a CCA e-mail and Council Vice-President (and former CCA President) Dan Slattery’s canned response to e-mailed protests.
Here’s the CCA’s story (and see how well they are sticking to it):
From Town Council VP Dan Slattery’s E-mail:
Thank you for your e-mail. Let me clarify the current situation. The proposal before the Council is a proposed ban on large scale industrial sized turbines. The Planning Commission is going to write an ordinance pertaining to small wind turbines that could be used by homeowners in the near future.
From Ruth Platner’s Letter to the Editor:
Efforts to engage the public in a discussion of wind energy have been overshadowed by the image of industrial sized turbines. At our July meeting and August workshop, commission members voiced a need to isolate the issues of residential wind energy from those of larger facilities. With public support, we would prepare an ordinance that would apply only to wind energy devices for residential use. If there were a future ordinance for non-residential use, it would be a separate section, even if that results in some redundancy in the ordinance. The public needs to have confidence that whatever language we are developing now, will be for devices at a residential scale only.
From the Westerly Sun news story:
Ruth Platner, chairwoman of the Planning Commission, said: "We think a better effort at this time would be to write an ordinance for homeowner use and have it be an independent section of the zoning ordinance. Small homeowner wind energy devices are very different from the larger turbines that have been proposed and they shouldn't be in the same ordinance section. There may still be opposition to these, but we won't know that until we remove industrial turbines from the discussion." In explaining the delay, Platner said, "Meetings and comments are dominated by concerns related to industrial scale wind turbines. Public hearings revealed that details of the ordinance were in need of clarification and the public wanted more regulation than we had proposed."
From this morning’s CCA e-mail:
- The Planning Commission has asked that the current wind ordinance be set aside to allow the Commission time to draft language specific to residential wind turbines
Again, I ask all readers to PLEASE read the ordinance. It is a total ban, not a place-holder, time-saver or any of the disingenuous propaganda coming from the CCA. Platner’s remark that this is about “clarification” and that “the public wanted more regulation than we had proposed” is nonsense. It also contradicts the CCA’s own, supposedly valid, November 2009 poll.
The small group of NIMBYs opposing wind power have become the CCA’s source of wind power policy, not the huge majority of Charlestown
And Dan Slattery is flat out lying when he says “The proposal before the Council is a proposed ban on large scale industrial sized turbines.” Again, READ the ordinance.
Finally, it is certainly possible that sometime in the future, maybe in three years, maybe in five years – or more likely after the CCA members of the Planning Commission are voted out of office, there might be a new ordinance to accommodate home owners and small businesses who see the future in wind power. But the best judge of the future is past precedent. On that score, don’t count on the CCA people to deliver on the promised homeowner ordinance that is the central feature of their propaganda.
If Slattery, Platner, the CCA and its Planning Commission really wanted to clear the way for homeowners to install wind turbines, there is a simple and quick way to do it: Deregulate wind generators under 15 kilowatts. If a homeowner installs a crappy generator that makes too much noise, or poses a hazard, it can be dealt with under the existing nuisance and building code ordinances. But if the CCA and its minions believe that home-sized wind power is OK, than act on that belief
But coordinated rhetoric is all we’ve gotten from the CCA.
Author: Will Collette