MR. BARBER: Hello my name is Jim Barbour. I live in Naples, New York and I only recently came to this question of wind energy back in November. It was always active in my community, but I was one of the people that didn't pay attention because it was beyond me and what do I know about anything and an event took place in my life and I decided to go watch what was happening.
So I attended several meetings, Town Board meetings, wind energy meetings, and came away with the feeling of frustration and anger because every question that got-- the first meeting was a Board of Education meeting where SCIDA, which is Steuben County Industrial Development Agency, came to ask the Board for a pilot program, which is payment in lieu of taxes. Now I was chairman of the Zoning Board of Appeals in Naples for a number of years and whenever anybody came to the Board for a pilot program they were asking for a giant financial favor because they didn't want to pay taxes on whatever, they wanted to pay a certain amount of money to guarantee them money in their project.
These people that showed up before the Board were so filled with disdain and arrogance I was baffled by it, and doing that I started to look into it and found a letter from the State Comptroller's Department that SCIDA had been audited and there were nine recommendations that had been made as they did nothing in their charter that would carry through on their charter, so I went back and asked when would they make these changes and they don't have to make changes, they're above the law.
(Click to read entire Barbour Statement)
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