By Joyce Miles
Niagara Gazette
NIAGARA FALLS —
LOCKPORT — While the county Legislature has OK’d creation of an ad-hoc committee to look into questions about the benefits and costs to Niagara County of offshore windpower generation, one legislator isn’t happy about it.
Legislator Renae Kimble, D-Niagara Falls, is angered by a resolution sponsored by legislators Clyde Burmaster, R-Ransomville, David Godfrey, R-Wilson, and John Syracuse, R-Newfane, calling on the Legislature to rescind two earlier resolutions, in mid-2009 and earlier this year, that threw support to NYPA’s windfarm project.
Kimble sponsored the Legislature’s February 2010 call on NYPA to make sure offshore Niagara County was fully included in the windfarm project Request For Proposals — after doing a lot of legwork to ensure it had a fair chance at consideration.
In a private meeting last summer, Kimble said, she learned local offshore was not shown on NYPA’s proposal maps — and at NYPA’s direction, nobody was supposed to talk about what was. She called on U.S. Rep. Louise Slaughter to get offshore Niagara County on the map and it was done. Then, earlier this year, a NYPA trustee talking about the project got caught publicly mentioning only Lake Erie, not Lake Ontario, and Kimble wrote the resolution demanding NYPA ensure Niagara County got full and fair consideration as a windfarm site. Her resolution sailed through the Legislature, 17-0.
NYPA began promoting the windfarm concept more than a year ago. In all that time, Kimble said, she never heard a word of opposition from local lakeside town supervisors — or state Sen. George Maziarz, R-Newfane and Assemblyman Francine DelMonte, D-Lewiston, the two state legislators who attended a closed, noisy meeting of opponents at the Youngstown Yacht Club earlier this month.
Kimble said she suspects the Albany insiders are fanning windfarm opposition for their own reasons.
“I think it kind of has to do with the state elections. Incumbents are vulnerable,” she said. “DelMonte and the town supervisors were at the (NYPA-sponsored informational) meetings and nobody said anything. They didn’t know their constituents well enough then? It’s troubling to me that they’ve waited until this late date to raise concerns.”
Were the Legislature to take back its support for a Lake Ontario project now, Kimble said, it would look unstable and untrustworthy.
“If we start revoking resolutions, nobody will want to work with us; (resolutions) will be viewed as nonbinding, because you never know: Today 19 of us are in favor of something and two weeks later 10 are against it,” she said. “It puts us in a precarious position.”
