WIND ENERGY SITING REFORM ACT, H.4955
Governor Deval Patrick and his staff are pushing the state senate to adopt the Wind Energy Siting Reform Act in informal session.
The Act is now known as H.4955.
To read the the most recent version, please click here H.4955, Wind Energy Siting Reform Act.
The purpose of the Act is to achieve the governor’s goal of 2,000 megawatts of wind development by 2020 through an unprecedented set of special benefits for a single industry that includes overriding local control, replacing environmental laws with “standards”, and eliminating traditional rights of participation and appeal by the public.
H.4955, An Act Relative to Comprehensive Siting Reform for Land Based Wind Projects, is basically the same as the earlier House versions, H.4687 and H.4886, and the Senate version, S.2260.
It remains a radical and unprecedented assault on the fundamental rights of communities to control industrial development within their borders, on the environmental laws that our legislative body has enacted over the years to govern the impacts to our state’s natural resources, and on the long-established rights of municipalities and our constituents to appeal decisions adverse to their interests through the court system.
It concentrates all power over wind development projects in a single agency, the Energy Facilities Siting Board, part of the Executive Office of Energy & Environment.
It also adds an enormous bureaucratic bloat to the EFSB that will be tremendously costly at a time when we are cutting essential services in other areas.
It could affect more than 200 municipalities within our Commonwealth, reaching into communities with just enough wind and space to allow a single 400-foot wind turbine.
This Act does not solve the problems which it is intended to address, but it creates a slew of new problems for our constituents, municipalities, and state agencies.
At least two regional planning agencies have expressed their concerns with the Act, along with a number of select boards and environmental and sportsmen’s groups.
This Act explicitly authorizes a single state agency – the EFSB – to approve wind projects regardless of local decisions, and regardless of recommendations from other state agencies with expertise related to the project. It replaces environmental laws with weaker “standards” that can be waived solely at the discretion of that agency. And it eliminates rights of appeal by municipal officers, municipalities, and most rights by other parties.
No other industry has ever received this mix of special privileges, and that includes other power plants. This is an extreme piece of legislation that supplants all other laws and regulations that have been in force for decades, hands all power over to a single executive branch agency, and constricts the role of the court system in the review of projects which by definition are huge intrusions into undeveloped areas and residential neighborhoods. We are already seeing the impacts that a single wind turbine is having on a residential community in Falmouth. If this Act is enacted, we will see many more of these problems, but we will have stripped the local people of most opportunities to appeal the permits.
If we give this package of special privileges to the wind industry, how many other industries will seek to concentrate all power for decisions in a single executive branch agency, and strip everyone else of traditional powers of appeal?
While we may all want to support renewable energy, eliminating all the safeguards of existing state laws and judicial review is not the right approach.
This is a radical law that will injure Commonwealth citizens, and it should not be signed into law.