Ensure Fair Winds

Sardinia Standard December 2008

EDITORIALS

Ensure fair winds

Jay Burney

Attorney general crafts a code that strengthens wind power ethics

Updated: 11/04/08 7:05 AM

One thing springs to mind when reading New York Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo’s new code of conduct for companies seeking to place crops of giant wind energy towers around the state: Isn’t the behavior the code would ban already illegal?
Surprisingly — or, depending on your attitude toward New York government, unsurprisingly — no.
That’s why Cuomo’s new code of conduct is not only a good idea for the wind industry, but a model for rules and laws to govern how local governments keep healthy arm’s-length relationships with other industries seeking favors.

Right now there is no state law or other regulation that makes it illegal for a town official who is voting on zoning permits for windmills that may be nearly 400 feet tall to accept significant gifts, or even go to work for, the very companies seeking to erect those machines.

There’s no specific ban on a village, town or city official from clueing the wind developer in on some confidential information that belongs to the municipality. And there’s no requirement that any other marginal or blatant conflicts of interest, such as a town supervisor voting to give the company he owns stock in a permit for a field of giant turbines, be made public.

Those seemingly clear violations of government, and business, ethics are the things to be corrected by the code regulating the wind energy companies seeking zoning permits in New York. So far two of them, Noble Environmental Power of Connecticut and First Wind of Massachusetts, have signed on. More developers may, and should, follow.

There are reasons to hope that companies making giant investments in wind power make a lot of those investments in New York. The potential for clean wind energy to produce up to 20 percent of the state’s energy needs is enticing.

It stands to be not only clean, but profitable. The developers make money. The landowners who lease sites to the developers make money. And towns can reap such large tax windfalls from wind turbines that, sometimes, everybody else’s property taxes virtually disappear.

But support for the sprouting projects is not universal. Some people find them ugly. They worry about noise and other detriments to their property values. And, when conflicts pitting neighbor against neighbor arise, there is always the concern that decisions are based not on a concern for the greater good, but on the potential for individual profit.

Even if a conflict is only sour grapes — “He’s getting thousands of dollars a year for a windmill lease and I’m not” — it is in the best interest of everyone that the sometimes controversial process of granting permits for landscape-altering projects be as trustworthy and transparent as possible.
Should the same kind of rules apply to other industries with business before town boards? Of course they should. Should they be codified into state law, rather than created by the attorney general and the industry involved? Indeed.

Those are questions for the Legislature to tackle. Until it does, Cuomo has done both the backers of wind energy and the opponents the favor of making the rules clear and fair.