By Will Collette
If you subscribe to our town's Paper of Record, the Westerly Sun, I hope you saw Charlestown's PAID legal advertising on pages 16 and 17 of yesterday's paper (September 20). This is the second time town taxpayers have paid for this legally-required public advertising of Charlestown ordinance that totally bans wind to energy devices of any size, type or location.For weeks, Planning Commissar Ruth Platner, the CCA-dominated Town Council majority and even the Westerly Sun have been saying this ordinance is NOT a total ban. It's just a pause, a time-out, that will allow Platner and her merry band of Planning Campensenos to craft a nice ordinance for resident wind energy.
We keep saying that you should READ the ordinance, not just listen to the propaganda.
Town taxpayers just paid for a full page and a half that shows the wind ban ordinance in context. The context is that the ordinance adopted by 3-2 on September consists of several lines imposing a total ban and line after line after line of stuck-out language from the ordinance this total ban replaces.
There was no need for the total ban. The language that was deleted accomplished all of the objectives the CCA and its minions had set - it banned industrial turbines and it set the bar so high for residential and medium sized wind generators as to make it almost impossible to get a permit.
But nope, that wasn't good enough for the CCA and the town's anti-wind NIMBYs. Wind power is bad, bad, bad and they did not want to take any chances.
The actual pages from the Westerly Sun are behind their pay wall - you can't see them unless you subscribe. Then you can go get it from the recycling bin (or the bottom of the bird cage).
But that ordinance as it was published - with all the strike-outs and the little bit of language that is left - is available on the town's official website by clicking here.
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| You paid for it so you might as well read it. Click on this link. Note that the town named the file "Wind_Prohibit" |