Published on August 5, 2009

BARTON — It took only a few minutes for the Barton Area Chamber of Commerce to agree that the village trustees got it wrong, a week ago, when they closed their end of Duck Pond Road to the cars and pickups people will drive to work while the Sheffield wind farm is under construction.

Meeting Tuesday morning, chamber members voted unanimously to oppose such a ban.

Though it has been strictly neutral on the wisdom of putting 16 big wind turbines on the Sheffield hills that overlook Barton, said Chamber Vice President Jethro Hayman of NEK Information Associates in Glover, “I move that as a chamber we are not for a ban that would punish our community businesses.”

Amy Braun, owner of the Barton Pharmacy, put the same idea in blunter terms.

“I pay close to $30,000 a year in utilities and taxes to this community,” she said.  “I’m really feeling this ban is slitting my throat.”

And one of the wind project’s most determined opponents, Liz Butterfield of the Barton Village Corner Store, urged her fellow merchants to “go for it.”

“I fought the wind towers from the beginning,” Ms. Butterfield said.  “But the reality is we lost the war — they’re coming.  We might as well get out of it what we can.  It’s been a rotten summer.  I think it would be beneficial to let the workers come through the village.”

Though they reserved the right to change their mind, the Barton Village Trustees agreed at their July 27 meeting to bar “construction vehicles” from the short stretch of Duck Pond Road that runs through the village.  That was a final condition, before they agreed to let Vermont Wind bring pieces of the 16 towers and the crane that will erect them through the village to their sites in Sheffield.

It had already been agreed that overweight loads of construction materials like gravel and concrete would avoid Barton, and reach the construction side from the other end of Duck Pond Road in Sheffield.  But the July 27 amendment extended that ban considerably.

The trustees said that “construction vehicles” would include personal cars and pickups that Vermont Wind’s local employees and contractors use to get to and from work.

However the trustees agreed that the village merchants should be surveyed before they made a final decision on the ban.

Vermont Wind representatives said they would attempt to enforce such a ban as a condition of employment.  But one of them observed that it could cost the village half a million dollars in retail sales.

At Tuesday’s meeting the chamber agreed that the anti-ban resolution should be delivered in person at the next meeting of the trustees, on August 10.

The village trustees were not at the meeting, but the Barton Town Selectmen were represented by their chairman, Rupert Chamberlin.  “I believe it’s illegal to even try to stop somebody from going up that road,” Mr. Chamberlin said.

Most of Duck Pond Road, and most of the residents whose peace and privacy the ban was designed to protect, are in the town of Barton, outside the village limits, and thus under the jurisdiction of the selectmen, rather than the trustees.