January 17, 2013
Massachusetts

O’Donnell attorney to Board of Health: “We might have to temporarily cease operations”

By Bradford Randall | Jan. 17, 2013 | kingstonjournal.com

KINGSTON- In an email forwarded to the Board of Health, John Yunits, Mary O’Donnell’s attorney, has written about the possibility of modifying turbine operations to ameliorate documented complaints about O’Donnell’s three wind turbines on Marion Drive.

In the letter, entitled “mediation,” Yunits writes that O’Donnell pledged his mediation credentials and said that he will “try to work in harmony with the boards, the neighbors, the turbine owners and the experts to attempt to craft both an evaluation methodology to assess complaints, and to derive solutions to ameliorate those complaints.”

The Yunits letter was first sent on Tuesday, January 15, less than 24 hours after Monday’s BOH turbine hearing in the Kingston Town House. KingstonJournal.com received a copy of Yunits’ letter to the BOH this afternoon.

Yunits writes that O’Donnell was not trying to intimidate neighbors by requesting that they document the times they are negatively impacted by the O’Donnell turbines. “On the contrary, we will be assuming that the complaints are verifiable,” Yunits writes.

Yunits writes that the documentation from the turbine’s neighbors is necessary “to juxtapose the information with the correlative wind speeds, wind direction and ceilings so that we can track the info and devise remedial measures that may impact turbine direction going forward.”

O’Donnell’s attorney further writes that the information from the turbine neighbors is needed “to create a working baseline delineating certain conditions that would create a need to modify operations…including the potential that we might have to temporarily cease operations under certain conditions or at certain times.”

Yunits writes, “to make these changes we need to exact patterns that replicate the time of complaints based….wind directions and speeds, as well as time of day…to ameliorate flicker and noise complaints.”

The letter goes on to state that O’Donnell is “under the assumption” that the Massachusetts DEP will be placing sound monitoring meters at certain locations. “If not, please advise we will evaluate implementing our own, but only with the agreement of all involved to lessen the fear that neighbors may have bias or prejudice.”

Yunits writes to the BOH that, while he his a professional mediator, he is employed by O’Donnell and “will be only a part of the team of problem solvers that will work with the neighbors, the board designees and specialists.”

URL to article:  https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2013/01/17/odonnell-attorney-to-board-of-health-we-might-have-to-temporarily-cease-operations/