Nearby wind host town is learning hard lessons
MAILBAG: Nearby wind host town is learning hard lessons | Lockport Union-Sun & Journal | www.lockportjournal.com
MAILBAG: Nearby wind host town is learning hard lessons | Lockport Union-Sun & Journal | www.lockportjournal.com
Oh, if only the Orangeville Town Board would have listened to Clear Skies over Orangeville, the neighbors’ preservation group formed to save Orangeville from subsidy-driven corporate wind wolves. We tried to tell them that Invenergy’s ever changing LLCs would run roughshod over their promises to Orangeville after their industrial wind factory was up and running. Oh, what a tangled web they wove.
After tons of diesel-spewing equipment had to be called in to fix “clean green” turbines that had only been up for three years (they told us the turbines had a 20-year lifespan), the Town of Orangeville recently passed a resolution to sue Invenergy LLC for not maintaining roads as promised. What a surprise! This compromised town board with Sue May at the helm ignored research from other industrial wind projects, citizens’ complaints of noise, problems with well water, lower property values and the impossibility of selling some of the homes after these massive turbines were installed. They are too large and in too close proximity to residents’ homes.
In 2017, Orangeville property sales data shows homes, if they sell at all, sell well under assessment – 21 percent less than 2012 assessments and 30 percent less than 2016 assessments. Thanks, Orangeville town board, for not insisting on a property protection plan.
When it became evident that Orangeville was going to be sold out by the compromised town board, many of us cried as we left what we had hoped would be our permanent homes and farms of our dreams. We had sunk our hard-earned cash into what we thought would be our lifetime investments, and many of us lost valuable dollars, because of negative impacts from industrial scale turbines.
Today, Orangeville is wasting precious money that would never have needed to be spent, had common sense ruled, instead of greed.
Because of the self-serving political greed of the current Wyoming County regime, ever-rising taxes are devastating the economic base and quality of life in industrial wind “company owned” towns. Buyers beware: “If you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got.”
Cathi Orr, founder and former president Clear Skies Over Orangeville
Now residing in Barker
URL to article: https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2017/11/15/nearby-wind-host-town-is-learning-hard-lessons/