Wind power is unworkable

Longtime friend Rick Tillotson took a swipe at me at the wind-tower hearing in Lancaster recently by dredging up my long-ago opposition to a traffic signal at the intersection of Parsons, Main and Colby streets in Colebrook. This, coupled with my loathing for a horizon full of 410-foot towers with blinking lights atop, apparently is supposed to confirm my unwillingness to be dragged into the present century.

The reason I strongly oppose the wind-power project is that it will despoil miles of wild and beautiful high-country scenery and skyline for power and profits that will go far to the south and leave us with little in the way of local jobs or economic gain. It is simply a bad trade-off. Conservationists and stewards of the land have been trying to buy the Phillips Brook tract and preserve it as working forest, open for recreation, remaining on the tax rolls, its wetlands and high country forever protected. This massive wind project and the ridge-scarring road system to build and maintain it would nail such hopes in a coffin.

The reason the traffic light is not there is not because I opposed it, but because it's unworkable. The state's Department of Transportation engineers were unable to come up with a strategy for enough turn lanes without wiping out the majority of the parking spaces in that area that are so vital to a dozen or so stores and businesses. The merchants and other townspeople thought it was a bad trade-off for a complicated traffic-signal setup in which drivers would have wound up waiting, all day long, for as long as they wait presently with no signal.

Which, by the way, is hardly ever all that long. I'm in and out of those streets and through that intersection as much as anybody, probably more than most, and I hardly ever have to wait more than a minute and a half to two minutes - about the cycle, by the way, of a signal that would be required for such a complicated intersection.

Finally, one letter-writer sniped at me for being "the self-appointed spokesman for the North Country." Those are other people's words, not mine. I would not appoint myself spokesman even if I could, because it's a thankless job (I could, for instance, avoid all controversy, and just write about, oh, daffodils), and for me the pay to wade into such a fight is nil. I could call people who get personal about my opposition to a massive despoiling of the landscape - for far-off gain - a bunch of green-hoodwinked, bandwagon-hopping boosters who can't see the forest for the trees, but my mother taught me to be polite.

If this kind of foolishness keeps up, I'm thinking of running for office. Oh, maybe hog reeve.