BARTON — After sparring for months with wind power developers who need to move pieces of 16 huge towers to Sheffield through a corner of Barton Village, the village trustees were invited, Monday night, to become wind power developers.
They decided to accept the invitation — in a very limited and preliminary way — even as Trustee Ellis Merchant noted that the organization behind the project would be “sticking its head in a hornets’ nest.”
Patty Richards said her organization, the Vermont Public Power Supply Authority (VPPSA) was prepared to take the heat for reviving the idea of putting wind turbines at the old radar station atop East Mountain in East Haven.
“We’re prepared to do this,” said Ms. Richards, who is VPPSA’s manager of power supply, “to say this is a VPPSA project. It’s not Barton’s project — not yet.”
When they approved Ms. Richards’ request for approval to spend up to $250,000 to take a closer look at the project, Barton Village and its electric department became the tenth of 13 VPPSA members to do so. The organization supplies electricity to municipal utilities across the state.
The village’s three trustees agreed to the study after they were assured that Barton’s share, as a 4 per cent partner in VPPSA, would be capped at $10,160.
That’s a high estimate of the cost, Ms. Richards assured them, and Barton would only have to come up with cash if VPPSA opted not to proceed with the project.
If it builds the project, she said, Barton’s share of the cost would be rolled into the financial package that pays for it. And if Barton were to opt out of the project, she added, the cost of the study would be passed on to whoever picks up Barton’s share of the power.
Ms. Richards said preliminary estimates are that VPPSA could put three towers on the 17-acre site, each with a capacity of three megawatts, for a total of about $28-million.
The average cost of the project’s power over 25 years would be 8.3 cents per kilowatt-hour, she said.
That cost, she told the trustees, “really got my attention because it’s below market rates.”
Ms. Richards told the trustees Barton would need the power after about 2012, when its supply of electricity is expected to slip below demand. In particular, she said, Barton’s share of about one million kilowatt hours a year would largely satisfy state requirements for renewable energy. The balance would be picked up by the recently restored generator at the village’s hydroelectric plant in Charleston.
Barton’s share would amount to about 6 per cent of its power needs, Ms. Richardson said.
Much of the preliminary work has already been done by the site’s prior owners, she told the trustees. When it abandoned the site in 1961, the military left behind an eight-mile access road that she described as “extremely overbuilt.”
And would-be wind developer Matthew Rubin paid for many of the studies needed to support the project. He failed to win the Public Service Board’s approval after he refused to conduct a study of the project’s effect of migratory birds and bats.
VPPSA would do the bird-bat study, Ms. Richards said.
She agreed to give the trustees two weeks to make up their minds about approving the study, and its potential cost.
But when Trustee Scott Wright said he was prepared to make that motion Monday night, trustees Bob Ferlazo and Mr. Merchant agreed, and the matter was settled.
Monday provided a rare respite from negotiations with First Wind, the developers of the Sheffield site.
When asked about the status of First Wind’s request for permits to bring overweight and oversize loads up Duck Pond Road, Mr. Ferlazo indicated that an agreement is in sight.
First Wind has resisted a firm village demand that it post a $1-million bond to cover any damage the loads do to village roads and utilities.
However, Mr. Ferlazo said, First Wind has notified the village that all three of the highly specialized transportation companies that would actually move the turbines through the village have said they would be willing to post such a bond.
In other business Kristin Webb, chairman of the Barton Memorial Building Restoration and Revitalization Project, presented a $1,000 check which she termed the second installment of the project’s share of the local match of a federal grant that will be used for improvements. “We are half-way there,” Ms. Webb told the trustees.
Ms. Webb and another resident at the meeting, Denise Valley, expressed dismay when the trustees agreed to write off 19 “old dead uncollectible electric accounts” for a total of just over $10,000.
Office manager Lucie Gaboriault explained that the auditor wanted the bad debts off the village books, but that the village would still recover as much of the total as possible.
“I think that’s far, far too much,” Ms. Valley said. “It should never have gotten to $10,000.”
Of the total, $1,600 was for a line extension, and more than $4,000 represented the bills of a Brownington farmer who, Ms. Gaboriault said, has gone bankrupt.
Mr. Ferlazo said most of the bad accounts were very old, and relatively small.
The trustees revisited, but did not change, their decision in late June to award a power line clearing contract to Mr. Merchant’s company, E.M. Tree Care.
“A couple of contractors felt we didn’t understand their bids,” Mr. Ferlazo said.
Village Superintendent Brian Hanson said that Northco’s bid, which the trustees read as $400, was actually for $135 an hour for a three-man crew.
Mr. Merchant, who sat out Monday’s discussion as he had when the contract was awarded, had made a bid of $90.
“We will try next year to write a clearer ad,” Mr. Ferlazo said, “but it looks like we awarded the contract to the low bidder.”
After the matter was settled, Mr. Merchant said he had a question: “Those bidders could have been sitting here, you could have asked them questions?”
The trustees agreed that the meeting was open, and the bidders could have been there.
The trustees agreed that Mr. Hanson should work with David Snedeker of Northeastern Vermont Development Association on investigating a grant for federal funds to build the proposed Barton Community Park along the Barton River behind Church Street.
Plans already drafted for the park include rock and wood chip walkways connecting the library parking lot to the ball field, a gazebo, gardens and a kids’ area.
If the grant were applied for and awarded, Mr. Hanson said, the village would be a responsible for a 20 percent match, of which 10 percent would have to be cash and the rest donated goods and services.
Mr. Hanson’s proposal received a typically informal response.
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