Lyme board did homework on law

The Lyme Planning Board concerns itself with crafting reasonable zoning laws for consideration by the town board. The Planning Board sent wind turbine questionnaires to every Lyme resident. We read and tallied the results from each of the 916 surveys returned.

The survey respondents, by clear majorities, indicated that they did not want wind turbines near the water or the population centers of Chaumont and Three Mile Bay. BP Alternative Energy and Voters for Wind now say that the survey process was somehow flawed, but all of the surveys and comments are publicly available at www.townoflyme.com.

BP and Voters for Wind say the Planning Board did not do enough research when crafting the wind law. They preferred that the town adopt their law, without any input from Lyme residents. Members of the Planning Board reviewed the BP Web site, AWEA (the national trade association for the wind energy industry) and NYSERDA (New York state's energy development authority). We investigated information from all viewpoints.

We sent out surveys, held two public hearings, conducted and attended informational presentations (with all sides of the issues presented), reviewed the latest books and articles on wind turbines and their impact on the locales in which they have been sited, attended NYSERDA conferences, talked with Independent Service Operators (people who operate the electrical grid), and most importantly, read each and every survey and comment that was sent to us from Lyme residents.

We also talked to as many people as possible, visited the Maple Ridge and Fenner, N.Y., wind facilities, and researched the effect of industrial turbines in other countries, where wind turbines have been in operation for years. We did our homework, and the result is a well thought-out and reasonable zoning law that considers the views of the majority of residents of Lyme. There is a designated Wind Overlay district of approximately 50,000 acres of land in Lyme (approximately 40 percent) more suitable to industrial wind turbines than the villages and the waterfront.

The Planning Board conducted its work in public meetings using public surveys and hearings. The town wind facilities law, all transcripts from the public hearings, of which the majority of the letters and comments were in favor of the town of Lyme law's setbacks, and all the surveys in full are on the town 's Web site, www.townoflyme.com.