Derby developer’s offer is a bribe
The Orleans Record, orleanscountyrecord.com 12 March 2012
A wind power developer, Encore Redevelopment, is seeking to build another commercial wind farm in Derby. Encore is attempting to get permission to do it from the locals with “easy” money. Despite the governor’s call for a moratorium on further commercial wind power developments, Encore is drooling over the public subsidy profits it can scoop up, enough to ignore not only the governor, but the cool heads out there who are concerned that nowhere near enough research and testing has been done to justify even the wind farms that have already been built, much less new ones.
Encore Development is proposing to erect two industrial-scale wind turbines in Derby. It has offered annual “community benefit payments” to Derby worth up to $78,760 or more over the next 20 years. Call it what you will, the label “community benefit payments” is a bribe by any name.
It isn’t the first time such a bribe is being used to grease the skids for a permanent addition of questionable value to the view-scape of a Kingdom town. Two other towns have succumbed to the seduction of Vermont taxpayer subsidized “gifts” from other developers looking for six-fold profits from very expensive wind power. Sheffield and Lowell citizens, dazzled by seemingly free dollars, acquiesced and took the money. Now both have defaced and scarred ridgelines and a few bucks to assuage their offended aesthetic senses. One might ask the question: Did Sheffield and Lowell buy into big wind’s ridgeline defacing towers, or did wind developers buy them?
The current question is, will Derby taxpayers sell out in the same way to Encore Development and get their own ugly towers in exchange for chump change?
URL to article: https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2012/03/12/derby-developers-offer-is-a-bribe/