Comment Alert

Comment

Comment by Frank J. Heller, MPA on July 17, 2016 at 10:02am

DONE!

"

Dear Mr. Margerum:

I was one of the early consultants to local government planners on assessing the impact of wind turbines on the community, habitat and environment. Among them were the City of Portland’s planner, the towns of Brunswick and Lisbon Falls, and a conclave of planners largely from Androscoggin county.

While the issues have become more clarified and documented they remain the same…noise, flicker, night lights, bat/insect/bird kills, visual disturbance; the legislation has been crafted by lobbyists for the wind industry to avoid the most odious of impacts. Your draft, for example, while focused on scenic impact, omits consideration of the following:

• Scenic and other impacts of access roads, the development facilitated by increased access, environmental degradation caused by increased backcountry transit using ATV’s and snow machines, and transmission lines now at the promotion of wind farm owners.
• Scenic impact affects property values enormously. Most realtors selling/reselling vacation property estimate scenic view lines can add up to 40% on the asking price of real estate. When you lower the value of an relatively expensive property, you produce a ripple effect which ends with challenges to property tax rates and reduced income to run public schools and local government. Your guidelines need to be modified to include surveys of local realtors and tax assessors on this critical impact.
• Transmission lines are really scars on the landscape that can go on for miles and remove, permanently, large numbers of trees that are critical for removing CO2 from the atmosphere. I personally witnessed the scar in Woodstock for one R.O.W. which appeared to be several hundred feet wide and removed mature trees. Your legislation ignores this massive negative impact on climate change; an impact so great the U.S. forest research service has developed and validated software, iTREE, ECO to measure the impact of one tree on the atmosphere and on a watershed, iTREE, HYDRO. Apparently, D.E.P is blind to the use of this technology, to measure these ‘tangible benefits’ despite it being free.
• To make matters even worse, clear cuts for transmission lines are sprayed with herbicides permanently reducing the ability of regrowth in removing CO2—let me add that trees remove other pollutants, retains water that becomes run-off exacerbating storm water flooding, and kills root masses which purify rain water affecting public water supplies. Then there is the impact of the herbicides and the lack of a policy found in other environmental legislation to provide a suitable offset for the loss---i.e.  acquiring land elsewhere and replanting a comparable forest.
• Your rules do not measure these environmental impacts, a shocking oversight when you consider that the cumulative impact of removing the trees may well offset any carbon credits. This is a deliberate omission crafted into legislation by lobbyists who have contaminated once pristine environmental groups like the SIERRA CLUB with ‘donations’.  

It is time to measure the total impact on both the environment and the community; you’ve selectively engineered draft rules which omit this impact…do we have to sue you to get this done or will you live up to the overall mandate of the Legislature to keep Maine a wilderness state and not a power generator for the rest of New England?

If you have questions, or need documentation, please call or write me.

V.T.Y.

Frank J. Heller, MPA

12 Belmont St.

Brunswick, Maine 04011-3004

207.729.6090/1590."