Published on March 28, 2007

MONTPELIER — The technical hearings on UPC’s Sheffield Wind farm have concluded three days earlier than anticipated.  A meeting tentatively scheduled for Wednesday, March 28, has been canceled as were the two scheduled for the end of last week.

Yet, while the decision to grant a certificate of public good to developers is now in the hands of the three-member Public Service Board, the hearings appear to be ending on a note that is as contentious as they were when the parties first met.

In fact, as reality was setting in last week that no more testimony would be forthcoming, the board was seeking to learn why a document from a federal agency had not been submitted into testimony.

At issue was a letter to UPC, dated January 3, 2007, from the New England office of the United States Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS).

The letter takes the company to task by calling bat and bird studies it conducted over the project’s site incomplete and insufficient.  And it calls on developers to do more work.

“We recommend that at least two additional years of radar and acoustic array surveys be conducted during spring and fall migration seasons to determine in appropriate scales what the spatial and temporal distributions of birds and bats is at the presently configured wind project site,” says the letter.

The USFWS recommended that more advanced studies be completed before construction went forward, according to Vernon Lang, who heads the regional office.  Its report went out after Mr. Lang inspected the site last November with members of the Army Corps of Engineers.

“The big issue for us is siting,” he said in an interview Tuesday.  “We try to determine up front if the site is suitable.”

And when it came to the Sheffield site, he added: “I had a lot of questions.”

Despite its reservations, however, the USFWS report was not hostile to the project.

“We believe the Sheffield Wind Projects fits in a category of activities that potentially constitutes a preventable environmental hazard to migratory bats and birds,” says the letter which was addressed to UPC’s Dave Cowan, vice-president of environmental affairs.  But first more preconstruction studies were needed using different technologies.

Those comments never made it into the record, though, until March 21 when the report was forwarded to the board by Robert Pforzheimer, a private citizen of Sutton who was active in the hearings.

In his cover letter, Mr. Pforzheimer suggested that the contents of the USFWS report might shed new light on the stipulation signed between UPC and Agency of Natural Resources (ANR) on wildlife studies at the site, including bats and birds.

The board turned to ANR for an explanation.

The story of bats and birds and wind turbines is not a new one.  Roughly a year ago the board rejected a wind farm for East Mountain in East Haven because developers failed to do a bat and bird study as requested by ANR.

As the attorney representing ANR at the hearings this time around, David Englander responded to the board’s request with a letter on March 21, the date when the first of the remaining three hearings was canceled.

Essentially, Mr. Englander said that many of the concerns raised by the USFWS report were addressed in the stipulation between the agency and UPC, “particularly with regard to post-construction monitoring and potential bird and bat mortality.”  At any rate, he noted that the agency had not relied in this case on input from federal wildlife biologists.

Mr. Englander also raised the questionable scenario of ANR seeking to put a letter into the record that was addressed to another party and after the board’s deadline had expired for pre-filed testimony.

Questions over the tardy arrival of the USFWS report appear to rest with the regional office in Concord, New Hampshire.  Mr. Lang said there was “some kind of a mail SNAFU at this end” that stopped the report from reaching all the parties in a timely manner.

While federal biologists knew about the Sheffield project for a couple of years, Mr. Lang said wind farm projects are becoming numerous, and are often cloaked in secrecy.

“It’s hard to have a firm handle,” he said.

There is no indication when the board will release its decision on the Sheffield project.  Deliberations on the former wind project at East Mountain began in April 2005 when the hearings ended and lasted until March 2006.  An appeal tacked on another six months until a final decision was rendered.