Going for this morning’s paper I was greeted by stunning bright blue heavens and spacious horizons beautifully decorated by trees and fields of green interrupted by but one flashing light tower and a feed silo. It reminded and filled me with joy, love and thoughtfulness of our great Creator.
Next, technicalities about counting landowners and petitions that require a three-fourths vote of supervisors to rezone the county into a giant wind farm tried to confound my day. What is truly at stake? A few lords want to remake our entire county into a giant landscape of incessantly turning windmills we don’t even need and make us pay for them with already rising electric rates and tax subsidies so they generate even more tax revenue to spend on other grandiose ideas called economic development. What is this? Can’t we relax a little and pursue individual happiness as our forefathers anticipated?
Then an essential question came upon me. Do we want to leave the entirety of our surroundings to the administrative technicalities of a zoning office through the mere vote of 12 people whose interests raise grave doubts of motive? Of course not.
Clearly, a matter of this gravity and importance should be decided by public referendum. Giant windmills that mechanize the landscape of the entire county forever and ever. Do we want these 400-foot-tall contraptions of undependable wind technology towering and sprawling over the county like an overwhelming Metropolis? I believe we the people should decide that through the collective power of our individual votes.
Beyond this, however, is an even more vital issue. Do we want state and county government to remake themselves into tax and bond funded economic development corporations? I do not, because those are inherently mismanaged and abused powers (state possession and economic repression) of failed Marxist/Fascist governments.
Robert F. Becker
Freeport
25 July 2007
URL to article: https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2007/07/25/public-referendum-needed/