Cohocton Wind Farm by Katie Graham

Despite facing three lawsuits, construction of fifty wind turbines continues in Steuben County.

Piece by piece, construction crews are putting up wind turbines on the hills of Cohocton. So far, fifteen wind turbines are in place.

By next fall, there will be fifty wind turbines, creating enough power for fifty four thousand homes in New York state.

Gerald Moore was the first landowner to sign a lease agreement with the company building the wind farm, U-P-C Wind. “We got to do something about the pollution,” says Gerald Moore.

As opposed to oil and gas, officials with U-P-C say wind energy is said to be clean energy that won't pollute the environment.

The fifty turbines will be build on the property of fifteen homeowners. U-P-C pays them money for leasing their land. Plus: the town of Cohocton will take in eleven and a half million dollars over the next twenty years.

“The tax revenues that we've already paid to Cohocton has more than doubled their annual revenues that they receive,” says Chris Swartley of U-P-C Wind.

Right now, the wind farm site looks like a construction zone, but Swartley says U-P-C Wind won't leave with it looking like this.

“We do our work and then we put the top soil back down where it was so that when we're finished the farmers will plant their crops pretty much up to the tower base,” says Swartley.

Not everyone is thrilled with the Cohocton Wind Farm. An organization known as Cohocton Wind Watch has filed three lawsuits in an effort to stop the wind turbines from being built. A spokesman says his biggest problem is that some of the turbines come within fifteen hundred feet of homes.

“The public safety is what we're fighting for. They need to be at least a mile and a half from where people live,” says James Hall of Cohocton Wind Watch.

“Sometimes people don't want to see a tall structure near their house,” says Swartley.

For now, U-P-C Wind has no intention of stopping construction.

A spokesman for Cohocton Wind Watch says the next court date to discuss their lawsuits has not been set.

U-P-C Wind hopes to have the wind farm complete by this fall, at the latest.