Cape Vincent: Windmills stir up a storm
Syracuse Post-Standard / Marie Morelli / 14 February 2010
Across the St. Lawrence River from Cape Vincent, 86 windmills — each more than 400 feet high from base to blade tip — tower over Canada’s Wolfe Island.
They’ve been there less than a year, a preview of what could be in store for Cape Vincent if two proposed wind farms, totaling more than 100 turbines, are built.
Just as surely as the river divides the U.S. from Canada, the windmill plans have divided Cape Vincent.
On one side: supporters who see the windmills as a source of income for struggling farmers, tax revenue for the town and county, and jobs, however temporary, in a community whose economy is dependent on summer tourism and a state prison.
On the other: opponents, many of them summer residents, who see the turbines as a blight on the gateway to the Thousand Islands and a threat to wildlife, health and property values.
Where’s Aubertine?
State Sen. Darrel Aubertine, a Democrat from Cape Vincent, has kept a low profile in the debate over windmills in his town.
Aubertine has sold the wind rights on his 500-acre farm in Cape Vincent to St. Lawrence Wind Farm, an entity of the Spanish energy company Acciona SA. The wind lease became an issue in his two 2008 campaigns for the 48th Senate District seat.
In 2006, when he was in the State Assembly, Aubertine wrote a letter to the Cape Vincent Town Board expressing his belief that members who have leased their land for wind turbines should not abstain from voting on them. “After careful reflection, I feel that it is ethically proper that in this case all board members should vote on the issue at hand. In fact, I believe it is their responsibility to do so,” he wrote.
Aubertine was named chairman of the Senate Energy Committee in May 2009. He relinquished his chairman’s role in January to Republican George Maziarz, of the Buffalo area, in what he said was a show of bipartisanship. Aubertine remains ranking majority member of the committee.
Aubertine did not return several calls for comment on this story.
And in the middle: town officials who are trying to come up with a law to regulate wind development, even as questions about conflicts of interest have dogged every move. Two members of the five-person town board, and three members of the five-person planning board, either personally hold wind leases or have relatives with wind leases, meaning the leaseholders or their families stand to profit if the wind farms are built.
