Wind turbine talks continue to sputter in Framingham

FRAMINGHAM - Yaakov Cohn stood before the Planning Board last night , vigorously whipping his jacket in a circle just in front of a mike stand.

"You can't tell me you don't find this disturbing," said Cohn, eliciting laughs and heckling from the handful of people inside the Memorial Building's Blumer Room.

Cohn, an ardent opponent of wind turbines, had a simple point: such structures, if allowed in the community, will be visual and noise nuisances.

Last night was the latest chapter in a saga that has dragged on for two years.

As with past meetings, nothing was resolved in terms of a law for wind turbines in town. The board took no vote.

"We're probably no further along than we were when we started two years ago," said Planning Board member Tom Mahoney, who sat on a town subcommittee charged with molding a wind turbine law.

Multiple people in Town Hall have said that subcommittee's meetings were typified by nonproductive, combative and polarizing debate about turbines.

Not everyone, it appears, agrees with Cohn's outlook.

The subcommittee has not met since before last spring's Town Meeting, said Cohn, who also served on subcommittee.

Some Planning Board members, like Christine Long, said that board should be busy tackling other more pressing issues like zoning initiatives and the town's master plan.

"This board keeps getting distracted," said Long.

Long and Planning Board Chairwoman Carol Spack supported hiring a consultant to advise the town how to proceed.

Other board members, like Sue Bernstein, were not so sure that would be a wise move because there was no guarantee a consultant could "get us out of this quagmire," she said.

Planning Board member Andrea Carr-Evans suggested that, unlike in the past, there is no urgent need to get a law hammered out.

Initially the town had tried to draft a bylaw because Staples considered erecting a wind turbine at its corporate headquarters off Rte. 9 and the town essentially did not have guidelines that covered such a structure.

But Staples, after testing the wind near its corporate headquarters, decided in December 2008 the project was not financially worthwhile.

"I don't see a pressing need," said Carr-Evans.

Now it's unclear, said Bernstein, if there is enough wind anywhere in town to make erecting such a structure worth it.

The board discussed possibly crafting two bylaws, one for residential wind turbines and one for commercial, but did not appear to reach any kind of solid consensus.

Some, like Town Meeting member Tom O'Neil, who also served on the wind turbine subcommittee, say the board should continue to work on a bylaw.

"It's a huge mistake not to go forward," said O'Neil.