Published on January 26, 2005

Part III of a series

MONTPELIER — Any issue that puts the two former antagonists from the Champion lands debate on the same side may be evidence enough to suggest that when it comes to placing wind farms on Northeast Kingdom ridgelines, there is no easy answer.

No known guideposts.

No ties of loyalty.

The Vermont Traditions Coalition is a conservative group made up of organizations like the Averill Lake Association; Hunters, Anglers, Trappers Inc. (HAT); the Farm Bureau; as well as Champion camp leaseholders and others involved in the forest product industry.

Throughout the Champion land debates five years ago, it carried on a running attack against any plan that put ecological interests ahead of traditional ones when it came to public policy on the 133,000 acres that make up the Champion lands. And that brought it head-to-head with the Nature Conservancy in a fight that became increasingly bitter and personal.

Now, as the debate over placing four wind towers on East Mountain approaches a hearing before the Public Service Board (PSB), the two foes have inadvertently become allies.

“To allow favored special interests to build wind towers on the ridgelines that overlook the valleys where generation-old benign land uses are prohibited is not ecology. It is hypocrisy,” says Steve McLeod, the coalition’s founder and lobbyist, in testimony recently filed with the board.

Since East Haven Windfarm, (EHWF) a Montpelier-based company, filed its petition with the board for a certificate of public good, it has had to labor under the shadow of the Champion lands debate.

“Unfortunately, the wind debate is being played out in the context of the Champion issue,” says Mark Sinclair, who heads the Vermont Chapter of the Conservation Law Foundation, a national environmental advocacy organization.

“I would have done anything to see the first wind farm be anywhere else that didn’t raise the Champion passions.”

But those passions may have been fanned even brighter by a statement released Tuesday from easement holders on the former Champion lands that border the project’s site on East Mountain.

At issue is whether the PSB might require EHWF to establish a safety zone to protect the public from ice thrown off the windmill’s blades. If it does, the zone will likely extend onto the adjacent Champion land and cause the wind company to seek some arrangement with the easement holders — the Agency of Natural Resources, the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board, and the Vermont Land Trust.

In their statement Tuesday the three stakeholders essentially said that authorization to create such a zone on land encumbered by a conservation and public access easement belongs solely to the Legislature. The decision could bring the Champion issue —with its emphasis on preserving ecological values and the rugged natural rideglines of the area — out of the shadows and onto the table.

Reactions from the two sides were predictably mixed.

“We think it’s a great decision,” said Katie Anderson, a member of the Kingdom Commons Group that opposes wind farms on ridgelines.

“We think it’s a non-issue,” said Windfarm’s David Rapaport, adding that he believes the PSB is not going to require a safety zone.

The decision is, nevertheless, likely to cause more soul searching within the state’s environmental community, where the East Mountain project has become increasingly divisive.

Originally, the Vermont Natural Resources Council (VNRC) supported the project to place four wind towers, 220 feet tall with blades reaching an additional 115 feet, on 17 acres across East Mountain. Early in the process, the council was persuaded that because the mountain was the site of a former radar base in the fifties and had an access road, the project “would fit our criteria for giving it a thumbs up,” says Executive Director Elizabeth Courtney, who for four years in the early nineties chaired the state’s Environmental Board.

But today, nearly two years later, VNRC appears to be having second thoughts. According to Ms. Courtney, recent evidence about the project’s impact on migratory birds and the danger of ice throws “has worked against our wholehearted support of this project.”

Although its web site characterized VNRC as “Vermont’s environmental guardian since 1963,” the council does not have party status in the upcoming hearing before the PSB. And without party status, it will not be allowed to submit evidence. But Ms. Courtney said VNRC may make its doubts known in op-ed pieces to the press.

“We’re taking this new evidence to heart,” she said.

The issues dividing the environmental community over the East Mountain Project are fundamental, or as Ms. Courtney phrased it, “near and dear to our heart.” The debate pits conservation of a wilderness area against a widely shared belief that Vermont must do more to promote renewable energy. And renewable energy in Vermont has come more and more to mean wind power.

New England, argues Mr. Sinclair, is “at the end of the tailpipe” when it comes to emissions from power plants burning fossil fuels.

And while he concedes that wind might not “solve our energy needs,” he says it’s “not fair to say it makes no difference.”

Among the state’s environmental groups, none has been more active in promoting wind power than the Vermont Public Interest Research Group (VPIRG). Last summer it released an energy plan that said 15 percent of Vermont’s electric energy should come from wind. That would require about 270 turbines sited on six to ten wind farms throughout the state, said VPIRG’s chief Paul Burns in testimony this month before the Senate Natural Resources Committee.

A belief in wind power, he said in an interview Friday, has resided with the organization “almost from the first day of existence.” Last fall VPIRG led an unsuccessful charge to convince the Douglas administration that state lands were appropriate sites for wind farms. The effort failed, much to the consternation of Mr. Burns.

“There is no justification for banning any possibility of developing wind power on state lands,” he said.

But in the present East Mountain debate, VPIRG has had to contend with a fly in the ointment — what at the very least is an appearance of a conflict of interest.

The entrepreneurs who own and run East Haven Windfarm sit on VPIRG’s board. Matt Rubin, the president of EHWF, is the chairman of the board, while Mr. Rapaport is a board member and preceded Mr. Burns as the organization’s executive director.

The fact that VPIRG, which characterizes itself as the “state’s largest consumer and environmental advocacy” organization, ardently backs a renewable energy project in which two of its key board members stand to profit, is causing some in the environmental community discomfort.

One member of that community, who asked not to be identified, said VPIRG’s dual role had left him flabbergasted.

If there is a conflict, however, Mr. Burns doesn’t see it. Or at least believes the organization has taken steps to deal with it.

VPIRG has had a long-standing policy on wind that was created, he said, “long before Matt Rubin envisioned himself in the wind business.” It’s a policy, he added, that preceded either Mr. Rubin’s or Mr. Rapaport’s presence on the board.

“Since I’ve been here, no decision has come before the board on wind power,” said Mr. Burns, who assumed the role of executive director in June 2001.

To distance itself from conflicts, VPIRG has a policy in place that prevents a board member from either participating in discussions or voting on an issue in which he or she has a financial interest. Otherwise, said Mr. Burns, noting that others on the board have similar conflicts with renewable technology, “we would be doing nothing on clean energy.”

At the PSB’s hearings scheduled for March, only one environmental group will play an active role in support of the East Mountain project. Testimony backing the scientific value of placing four towers, each capable of generating 1.5 megawatts of power, has been placed into evidence by the Conservation Law Foundation (CLF).

It’s chief, Mr. Sinclair, says there is “a bigger truth” to conservation than simply preserving land through a conservation easement. The Champion lands, he advises, will become “much the worse for wear” if something is not done to clean the air of emissions.

To drive that point home, CLF has filed expert testimony with the board from an environmental engineer from the Dartmouth Thayer School of Engineering.

The East Mountain project, says Dr. Colin High, “will result in quantifiable reduction in air emissions in Vermont and New England.” The annual power produced by the four towers, he goes on to say, will have the equivalent of “taking about 2,200 automobiles off the road each year.”

When measured against power plants fueled by a mix of coal, oil, and gas, says Dr. High, the project will eliminate annually 11 tons of nitrogen oxide, 40 tons of sulfur dioxide, and 12,722 tons of carbon dioxide.

“With respect to emissions displacement," says the professor in his testimony, “it does not matter who buys the wind or at what price as long as the plant is operated.”

Mr. Sinclair argues that wind towers on East Mountain will help keep the neighboring Champion lands healthy. But the environmental organization that took the lead in laying out a management plan for the Champion lands believes that a mountaintop adjacent to those lands is no place to conduct an experiment with wind.

The Nature Conservancy (TNC) argues that the proposed wind farm for East Mountain is premature. Or as its director, Bob Kline, says, too much in a rush to find the silver bullet for Vermont’s energy woes.

A year ago the organization succeeded in slowing the project down by winning an argument before the PSB to do a pre-construction bird study at the site. One of the few certainties that study revealed, says TNC biologist John Rowe, was that the number of birds who would fly through the blades was “way higher than any of us would have predicted.”

TNC, which “never intervenes in the regulatory process” is intervening in this one. “Our goal is to do these things right,” says Mr. Rowe, who believes that not enough time was provided to study the project’s impact on an area known for its high ecological values.

“I don’t think this is a site we would give a blessing to,” he said.

“The way we’re involved in the regulatory process is to make sure there is good scientific data. In this case, not the site we should be experimenting on.”

The reluctance by TNC to embrace the project has upset some of its friends and members. Mr. Kline says he has been receiving calls asking: “What wrong with you guys? You’re not on board with wind.”

At first blush it appears that those groups that had a hand in the Champion lands planning are opposed to the project. Both the Conservancy and the Agency of Natural Resources have raised objections with the PSB over the site. VPIRG has singled out the agency for criticism on its web page by charging that ANR “has gone out of its way in the last nine months to set unnecessary hurdles in the path of East Haven Windfarm’s Section 248 permit,” the PSB process to determine whether to issue a certificate of public good to a project.

Attempts to solicit a comment from the Conservation Fund, which set up and bankrolled the Champion lands deal, garnered no response from its Vermont representative.

One of the organizations which supported Champion but has not taken a position on East Mountain is the National Wildlife Federation.

“Quite frankly, we’ve been sitting around waiting for other people to move on this,” says Steve Wright, who heads the Vermont chapter of the organization.

But personally, he is leaning toward ANR’s position. “Let the ridge tops be ridge tops,” he said in an interview last week from his Montpelier office.

Mr. Wright believes the environmental community needs “a candid conversation with each other” about issues the project raises. “Otherwise,” he added, “we’re going to embarrass ourselves, and we don’t need to do that.”

VPIRG’s Paul Burns suggested that divisions within the environmental community were being “overplayed by folks who oppose wind power.” Still, he added, it’s an “area where people of good will can disagree.”

If disagreements over wind power boil down to finding a suitable site, then Vermont along with New England may be unique, according to Mr. Sinclair of the Conservation Law Foundation. Unlike the remote sites of the western plains, he observed, New England is crowded, with few potential locations hidden from public view. But the search must go forward.

“The debate is one we need to have,” he said, adding there are no villains on either side.

Mr. Sinclair sees no unethical behavior in VPIRG’s support of the East Mountain project.

“Vermont is so small, VPIRG would be conspicuously absent by not saying something,” he said, noting that recently he became a member of the board.

The PSB hearing on the project is scheduled to begin March 14. The debate before the three hearing officers is expected to be passionate.

As Ms. Courtney of the Vermont Natural Resources Council observed:

“All are looking for the answer that would go to the greatest good. It’s a debate that depends on who you talk to. Which fork in the road is going to lead to the greatest good?”