Yates officials need to explain legal costs for fighting turbine project

Editor:

This letter is to get some information out to the residents of the Town of Yates. In April of this year, your/our Town Board passed a resolution that committed the Town of Yates to splitting the attorney fees 50/50 with the Town of Somerset to fight the turbines coming here. There was no limit stated as to how much the Town of Yates would be required to pay.

The Yates Town budget for attorneys this year is $19,000. Somerset has already spent almost $278,000 in attorney fees as of December 2017 to stop the turbines. When the board was asked if this would make the taxes go up in our town, we were told we would have to see when the budget came out!

This past week, the Yates Board and the Somerset Board filed a motion to stop Apex from having the public forum to release the preliminary layout of the project without first releasing it to the Town Boards. The forum was to give the communities (including the town boards) the  information about the project.

ALJ Sean Mullany’s ruling was that Lighthouse Wind has been and remains compliant with requirements under Article 10 and the motion was struck down.

So Yates residents, this is where some of our tax dollars are going that the Town Board agreed to share with Somerset on lawyer fees. We are paying fees for a lawyer to fight the release of information about the turbines! Where is the transparency? How much was spent to file this motion?

What are they afraid of?

True, verifiable facts should be made available to the public about this project. In my opinion the only reason to stop the forum was that the lies that have been being spread for years are going to be exposed as lies.

The Town Board is using our tax money to stop a project from coming here that will put money into our town that has the possibility to lower our tax burden, support our schools and breathe some air back into our dying economy.

This is our tax money they are wasting!

Every resident in the town should be asking our town board these questions at the next board meeting on Oct. 11 at 7 p.m. at the Yates Town Hall on Main Street in Lyndonville.

Susan Campbell

Co-leader of the local Mothers Out Front Team

Lyndonville