Public hearing at County

For those of you who have never been to a Cumberland County Council meeting, I will set the scene for you.

The Council Chambers are not very big. The Councillors and staff take up about half of the room and rest is two banks of seating, each being four rows that each seat around six people. Yesterday there was an extra row of chairs at the back, more chairs just outside the double doors at the back and a few down the aisle inside.

The press likes to sit front and to the right. Yesterday there was The Herald, Amherst Daily News and Oxford Journal. I didn't recognise any others, although there was someone with sound recording equipment. Other Council staff may be there and tend to take the front left seats.

Wednesday, the seats (Gallery) were full to overflowing, mostly of Gulf Shore people. People had travelled from Toronto, Fredericton, HRM and points beyond. AWPC took up most of the back row on the right. There were also competing wind energy companies and consultants.

The Councillors sit in two rows facing each other. There is an elevated front bench (courtroom style) where Warden Hunter, Rennie Bugley and (yesterday) Jim Coughlin, County Planner sits and the recording secretary sits at a desk below that. Near the gallery is another table with three chairs and three microphones from which the public make their presentations. This leaves an open area in the middle.

The meeting opens with "Oh Canada" and closes with "God Save the Queen".

Wednesday's meeting ran from 1-5pm. All other regular business was held off so that there was as much time as possible to hear presentations.

The rules:

No repetition of facts already submitted.

15 minutes maximum.

Councillors are not permitted to leave the room while presentations are being made.

Presenters are not allowed to ask questions but Councillors may ask the presenter questions.

There was a laptop set up if anyone had a PowerPoint presentation. Only one person used it.

There was no particular order of speakers.

The no repetition rule whittled down the number of presenters to just 20. There were people who had travelled from HRM who didn't get a chance to speak, which seemed like a shame. I had, untypical but luckily, not sent in my presentation ahead of time. Anyone who had sent their presentation in ahead was not allowed to speak. The very first (potential) speaker found this out very quickly. Warden Hunter runs a pretty tight ship when it comes to the rules.

Early on were presentations from the Province. I didn't catch their last names.

Jason from Dept of Energy told us that the Province is committed to be producing 20% of its energy from renewable resources by 2013.

Vanessa from Dept of Environment and Labour told us about the Environmental Assessment (EA) that has to be completed. She spoke very knowledgeably but too fast for my note taking skills, so what follows is only part of what she said. Wind power is a new industry and they are still working on how they are assessed. A wind farm is a Class 1 project and after the application for one is submitted there is a period of 25 days before a decision is made. The public has 10-14 days to look at the information and comment upon them. Those comments are posted on their website and are thus openly available to anyone to view. There are five decision options that can be taken by the minister. After a project is completed enforcement of infractions is handled through regional offices.

I strongly suggest you look through at least the citizen's guide to EAs

http://www.gov.ns.ca/enla/ea/docs/EAProponentsGuide.pdf

http://www.gov.ns.ca/enla/ea/docs/EACitizenGuide.pdf

The presentations included information about increasing complaints about noise in other locations, comparative turbine size (eg twice the height of the tallest part of Confederation Bridge), shadow flicker (three blades x 15 rotations per minute = 75 flickers per minute), wind farms in Alberta being more remote from residences, bird mortality concerns, a 40 turbine wind farm in Hawaii that over 10 years has fallen into disuse but with no one left to take down these eyesores, decibel levels used should be not just time weighted but weighted against background noise. There was information on property devaluation and a great deal of comment as to how much the Gulf Shore is cottage country and how important that is to the local economy. There was a concern about making bad neighbours over this particular project.

A couple of people who live near existing turbines spoke. There was a man who lives near one of the two turbines near Rodney (Windham Hill) and another who lives near the RCMP turbine and both said that you could sometimes hear it but it didn't bother them. The man from Rodney said there was flicker "for a few seconds".

Discussed was how different people have different perceptions of the same thing (noise, viewplane). Also discussed was the concern that there is stress from worry about noise, health issues, loss of property value and worry about making bad neighbours. While it seems sure that wind energy is going to become more prevalent, why should our community be the socio economic experiment when there are so many other, better places for it?

Many said that the setback issue was too complex for one size fits all land use bylaw and suggestions to deal with this varied from designating different setback to different land use zones, different setbacks from residences than from property lines, a win/win solution needs to be found . Another suggestion was for setbacks to be at a maximum and leave it to the proponent to prove that they could encroach on that setback without causing harm. We were warned that there is currently still a low knowledge level in the province and the country, so that we should therefore be very conservative in our setbacks.

There was information about the low population density of this county that leaves plenty of room for turbines. We were told we have a resource (wind) and when you have a resource, the people who want to use it will come, even if setbacks are conservative. If turbines need to go somewhere remote but with no transmission lines, then the transmission line will simply have to be put in - NS Power can't expect wind energy companies to just use current power lines.

In the four hours of presentations there was much more said, often with passion and deep concern.

Charles Demond (AWPC) responded to some of what had been said. He agreed that perceptions of problems can be affecting but suggested that because they were just perceptions, that they didn't then actually have any value. He addressed the EA process. They plan to have two more meetings. He agreed that turbines can be seen and can be heard, its a matter of what you can get used to. He said that with the oncoming wind energy industry generally, our future sound and viewplane levels were going to change. His company has already paid the deposit to NS Power for their Request for Interconnection which is due tomorrow.

It was decided that it was too late in the day to go through second reading. Not only that, they had still to review applications 47 through 61 that had been sent in earlier. A motion to table the second reading to May 16th so that Councillors could travel to Pubnico to visit the wind farm there was defeated. There was no discussion allowed that day because the motion was tabled (to May 2nd).

This part of the process is over, for now. Do not send any more materials to Jim Coughlin. However, that doesn't mean you can't contact your Councillor directly.

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I have spoken with quite a few people in the wind energy industry and they are very concerned about the Gulf Shore project. They are concerned that the bad press over this project will endanger their own projects. They agree with me that this project could actually be environmentally unfriendly because of lack of public approval that could later affect other, more appropriately located, projects.