Wind turbines and fraud
There was a fascinating story in the New York Times the other day about corruption and potential corruption in the wind turbine industry in upstate New York. It seems the players in the wind industry have figured out they can use payoffs to further their corporate goals and overcome local opposition to the erection of giant wind turbines.
The payoffs could be as blatant as a municipal official being told to look on the back seat of the car, where two company logo polo shirts and an envelope stuffed with cash were waiting for him. Or it could be the local elected official who has cut a wind turbine lease deal with an energy company who then votes to allow the turbines to go up elsewhere in the town as well.
If it's happening in New York, you can be sure it's happening in Pennsylvania.
In Pennsylvania, local government is, if anything, even more fragmented. Few rural townships have zoning ordinances, just about the only way a local government can put brakes on wind turbine development in Pennsylvania. With the Rendell Administration pushing wind development and no state siting regulations to determine whether a turbine is appropriate for a particular location, it falls to three-member township boards to make that decision.
While many local elected officials take their jobs seriously and aren't steamrollered by the wind companies, others are suckered by the promise of jobs (turbines create just a handful, and they often go to outsiders) or tax revenue (minimal, far less than a house of the same value). The real winners are the wind companies themselves and the local landowners who lease ground for the turbines.
How wind turbines can tear apart a community was something I wrote about for The Patriot-News in Harrisburg before I abruptly left that beat a year ago. Now Helen O'Neill of Associated Press has written a chilling story about how wind development in in a small New York community and how it has torn apart families. Another O'Neill, Eugene, would have loved this story. Elderly father controls the land and takes the wind money, leaving his bitter sons with wind turbines that are driving them mad with the soft whup, whup, whup of the blades and the shadow flicker they create.
There is an important place for wind energy, properly sited. But it mustn't be forced down the throats of small towns in the name of "energy independence" that the turbines won't do much to alleviate. Pennsylvania needs to make wind turbine siting a state-level process with tough rules that allow a community to just say no. And law enforcement needs to be alert for the possibility of corruption.
I think back to 1979 and a trial I covered for the Shamokin News-Item in U.S. District Court, Williamsport. Several former members of the Shamokin Area School Board were on trial for bribery and extortion, essentially for shaking down a Harrisburg architectural firm for kickbacks on the construction of Shamokin Area Elementary School.
The money wasn't left on the backseat of a car in this instance. Instead, a meeting in a local restaurant was arranged. Money was placed inside a menu and slid across the table to greedy, outstretched hands. Comical, almost. And different hands are still at the ready someplace in rural Pennsylvania where the wind industry wants to do business.