Bruce County wants the province to consult more about the Green Energy Act, much the same as it did with the Nutrient Management Act.

County planning chairman Charlie Bagnato said the county has been a leader in developing rules regulating wind farms. While the county isn’t opposed to forms of renewable energy, Bagnato said there’s discontent among property owners, conservation authorities and municipalities all concerned that the new legislation will ride roughshod over planning and property rights and disregard health concerns.

In a strongly worded letter to Environment Minister John Gerretsen, Bruce Warden Bill Goetz calls on the province to establish an renewable energy working group with sub groups to review and make recommendations on specific issues and potential regulations affecting solar, wind, biomass and other renewable energy projects.

“In our opinion there is a perceived provincial agency bias towards meeting the needs of the wind energy [industry] to the exclusion of concerns, issues and recommendations raise by our constituents and other municipal partners,” said Goetz in the letter to the minister.

He says the province has established advisory committees to make recommendations about other regulations and refers in particular to the nutrient management advisory committee established by the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs as an example. The 24-members group was drawn from a wide range of affected groups.

“There are a lot of unanswered questions . . . they jumped into the wind towers a little too soon and now it’s showing that maybe there should have been a little more discussion before they did that,” said Goetz.

“If you have a group around the table, each person with different ideas, and gets the others thinking and they might come up with better ideas than they had in the first place,” he said.