To the Editor - An Ill wind is Blowing Towards our Mountains

By Basil Powers

And it’s name is California Mountain Power and Kibby Mountain Wind power Project by TransCanada (A multimillion dollar conglomerate in cahoots with Harley Lee’s Endless Energy) It scares me to think that the face of our purple mountains majesty is in the hands of a very few people, Land Use Regulation Commission, of which I am not too proud, and their track record confirms my statement. It has always been my belief that this commission was charged by the legislature many years ago to protect and preserve our fragile environment from over zealous and greedy developers but now I am believing more and more with every passing day that all our state bureaucracies, The DEP, LURC, The Natural Resources Council of Maine, the Inland Fisheries and Wildlife Department, and their biologist, The Maine Forest service, and just about all of the agencies under the heading of The Department of Conservation are all after the fact agencies. Think about it for a minute. It’s always after something terrible has happened to damage our environment that the bureaucracies take notice and react. They then fine them a mere token of a fine, slap their hand and the developers are smiling all the way to the bank and I wonder if they even ever do pay the fine and to who and where does it go. For instance: LURC fined Plum Creek fifty seven thousand dollars for many LURC violations but I am thinking the environmental damage is closer to fifty seven million dollars. These low fines are no deterrent to more violations so on and on it goes. 
 
Now comes the wind farms on Black Nuble and Redington Ridge a disaster unfolding for the mountains. But LURC seems willing to break their own laws to let this happen and like always the American tax payers are going to have to foot the bill and even pay more for electricity to boot. To give these windbags a variance to proceed is so ridiculous!!! Who is going to oversee this program from start to finish? By their own track record not LURC!!! And when these wind farms are finally obsolete who is going to take them down and will they be America’s “Stone Hedge” into the future??? A contract should have a lot of fine print for these wind farms most certainly a paragraph or two as to who will pay for dismantling and clean up.THE DAMAGE TO THE MOUTAINS IS FOREREVER. WHY DID LURC AND THE LEGISLATURE MAKE THE ORDINANCE TO PROTECT OUR FRAGILE MOUNTAIN TOPS IN THE FIRST PLACE AND WHY NOW ARE THEY SO WILLING TO TEAR THEM DOWN? 
 
Maine is not going to gain a thing. We don’t need the electricity its all for some other state or Canada. 
 
Basil Powers 
Kennebago Road 
Coplin Plantation, Maine 04982 
246-3092