George Frantz wrote: > Of course I have read Dryden's local law, all 11 pages of it. Otherwise I > would not have made the comments I made.
Fair enough - maybe I went too far in calling it building permit like. However, reading your complaints makes me wonder whether you remember much about the Town of Dryden. > As far as the obstacles let's start with the $250 upfront fee, then go on > to: In this case, $250 isn't exactly an insane addition to the cost of the project. > -the requirement for Town Board approval of a Special Permit, after a > public hearing, which effectively makes the approval a political decision and > puts the applicant at the mercy of their neighbors; For better or worse, the Town handles pretty much every exemption to prior zoning through Special Permits. It'd be nice to have a better process, but this is just the way things are done here. > - the the requirement to provide the names and addresses of all property > owners within five hundered of your property; Come on, George. Those are available at Town Hall, in the same building where you're filling out the forms anyway. > - the requirement for a completed SEQR Visual Assessment Form, which can > take even a professional like me hours to compile the required information > for, and for which the DEC has fifteen pages of instruction for filling the > 2-page document out; Yeah, SEQR sucks. Isn't the point of SEQR to have something that requires lots of thought and consideration, though? > - the $3,000 to $5,000 that would be needed to produce computer > photographic simulations of the proposed residential wind turbine if > requested by the Town - almost a guarantee should even one neighbor step up > to the mike and oppose the application; I'm not sure about your pricing, but maybe. It didn't seem that onerous to me at the time. > - the excessive setbacks from property lines equal to the height of the > tower plus 10 feet, which means that the minimum lot size a resident would > need to be able to invest in the technology is almost two acres. Given the > almost universal use of engineered break points in tower design they can be > safely place on lots as small as a half acre; This one makes me laugh, I'm afraid. You're worried about neighbor-vs-neighbor, and at the same time you want to let people put up towers that are going to make the neighbors ask just what the @#X! is going on next door? Engineers can put in whatever break points they want - they don't tend to make the humans looking at the towers next door feel comfortable. (And I say that as someone who'd love to put up some kind of tower but can't likely ever because of setbacks.) > -the requirement that the electric supply lines from the wind turbine to > the home be placed underground at an added cost of $10 - $15 per linear foot. Given that a lot of the cause for complaint on wind turbines of any kind is visual, minimizing the visual impact doesn't strike me as that crazy a thing to do. > I certainly wouldn't characterize the above as a "building permit-like" > process, nor would I characterize it as being very encouraging to anybody in > the Town of Dryden who might be contemplating a residential wind turbine > system. Fair enough. > I'm sure the Town of Dryden Town Board didn't adopt the ordinance with the > intent of not permitting home wind energy systems. But as is the case so > often in Ithaca, NY, the obsessive fear of what could happen trumps the > vision of what should happen, and the control freak mentality takes over. The Town adopted it to make building wind turbines _possible_ in Dryden, after the Town Board had ruled that wind turbines were not covered by existing zoning and were therefore _completely banned_ in the Town of Dryden. (Cornell's proposed Mount Pleasant wind farm led to that exciting ruling.) On the bright side, this law grandfathered in the existing wind turbines, so their owners could relax again. The law could stand a rewrite - but I suspect I'd argue for the preservation of pretty much all the provisions you find objectionable. (Special permit has to go, and maybe SEQR and the photographic model could apply only to turbines above X height, where X is something to discuss.) Thanks, Simon St.Laurent http://livingindryden.org/ _______________________________________________ RSS, archives, subscription & listserv information for: [email protected] http://lists.mutualaid.org/mailman/listinfo/sustainabletompkins free hosting by http://www.mutualaid.org
