MR. HALL: I am James Hall. I reside with my wife and my daughter at 5029 War Road in Cohocton. I represent Cohocton Wind Watch. I'd like to extend a welcome to the attorney from Nixon Peabody. We appreciate you visiting our website everyday and we certainly hope you pass some of the information on to your clients. In the spirit of full disclosure, I believe in the free market. I had the privilege of selling a business to a Fortune 500 Company who's owned and controlled by a Fortune 400 individual 20 years ago. I'm not against business, but I'm a businessman and I can read a balance sheet, and I know what the merger and acquisition take over is all about, and let's be honest. The media came for their sound bytes. The business community of Rochester vocalized their support. That's what you see on the news tonight, but you don't get the real message.
Some excellent points were made earlier in this day, and I'm going to try to
follow-up on them. Let's be very clear. Iberdrola is not going to be traded in the United States as a stock. It will not be under SEC regulation. Now folks, that's one of the few protections the average human being has in this country, is to get a little regulation from the federal government so you can get financial reporting in a timely way based on standard accounting practices so you can evaluate the financial condition of a company. We have the experience of dealing with a company called Clipper Wind Power, LLC. They're the people that built the turbines for Steel Winds in Lackawanna, Buffalo. Of course they're not working and they have to be taken down because the technology in the gear boxes don't work. They're not traded in the United States. They're traded on the London Stock Exchange with no SEC regulation. The Public Services Commission needs to take this fact into account. It's crucial.
We're giving up infrastructure. This is your homeland security issue in this country. It's not just transferring billions of dollars, let's face it when the Euro first started to trade it was 85 cents to the dollar. It's close to $1.50 now. If I'm an investor over in Europe I'm buying Energy East all day long, folks. It's a bargain. And what are they gonna do? They're going to get that 11 percent return for their investment. And don't let anybody think for a minute that you're not going to be pay substantially higher electric charges. Especially when Iberdrola is one of the largest wind farm developers in the world. Now let's face facts boys and girls, this is just a reality you gotta deal with, it's more expensive to generate electricity with wind turbines. Fact. Nobody has ever disputed that. No attorney has ever disputed that. No representation of an association from the wind industry has ever disputed that.
And what do we have? We have the prospect that everyone will pay more for money to go out of the country with no accountability of any kind from a financial condition standpoint, and what do we have? A company, it's been alluded to, but let's get to it, anti-trust, folks. Do we know what a monopoly is? We were told earlier. Well, you're going see what a monopoly is and it's going to be a foreign monopoly. And why would the Public Services Commission approve a company with a record of predatory pricing and anti-trust? Anti-trust is serious. This is not a small violation.
Didn't we break up the oil companies at the turn of the century? Did we have the term we just got railroaded when they made the railroads? Well folks, you're going to see it in the electric business, in payments, in your bill. The Public Services Commission has the power. We could have packed this auditorium if we just wanted people here. It's been our experience, we talk to groups all the time, and nobody listens. We're appealing to you because you have the authority to get this information back to the Public Services Commission.
It's important that they stick with their recommendations. That wall of separation is so crucial. You cannot let a wind developer own the distribution facilities and rights. That line has to be a wall that's not severed and we don't want to hear about that they formed another LLC and they put it down in the Cayman Islands and they're now controlling all the wind projects outside the jurisdiction of the New York State distribution regulation because nobody on the state level cared. We've talked to politicians until we're blue in the face. We've talked to agencies until we basically can't hit a key stroke anymore on a computer, but nobody cares.
Yes, it was mentioned before. Follow the money. Let's face it, we've been around a long time. We know how politics work. I was in Albany 35 years ago working for a New York State Senator. I left New York Sate 30 years ago. I came back because I love New York. We all want to stay in New York, but we don't have a future for our children with utility costs out of control and guaranteed to go much further in the stratosphere.
I'll provide you with a few more documents that we don't have to believe. The financial stability of Iberdrola? It's questionable, folks. It's questionable because you don't know what the name of it is going to be. You don't know who the players are going to be. You don't know what the bill is going to be. It's just going to be higher. I'll close on this point.
Cohocoton Wind Watch has existed for about two years now. We'd like to do something better with our life, we'd like to have a life, and we're doing this full-time and we're going to continue to do this and expand doing what we're doing because there is political corruption that you can't imagine and only the light of day is going to expose this. You urge the Public Services Commission to do their duty and protect the public, not the corporations from Spain or France or Germany or wherever they'll be tomorrow.
07-M-0906_PSH_Roch_022008.pdf
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