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Are W.Va. resources being given away again?
I have been watching with apprehension as the industrial wind machine projects expand through our beautiful West Virginia mountains. I personally think that the wind machines are freakish, and I suggest that people drive up to the Mount Storm Lake area to look at them and decide if they want them as part of our view for the rest of their lifetimes. Our mountain scenery is one of the few unspoiled precious resources left in a state that is not rich economically.
One of the reasons we are not rich is that around the turn of the century out-of-state corporations discovered our vast untapped coal reserves and huge stands of virgin timber. Local people were relatively poor and uneducated and had no idea of the real value of these unique resources. They jumped at the chance to make some money from these things that they were not using and, unwittingly, sold them off to predatory out-of-state-corporations. They accepted pennies to the dollar for what they were actually worth. These treasures were then lost forever, and to this day, we still suffer from that legacy. The profits from our coal and timber resources are still leaving our state. Sure, we got some jobs out of it, but the real wealth still leaves our state.
Now these out-of-state wind energy corporations have discovered that our mountains hold an equally unique and valuable wind resource. These people describe how the Allegheny Front above Keyser is so perfectly suited for their industrial wind farm. It has a gentle slope to the west and a huge drop off the east that magnifies the ever present wind up there. There are power lines in the immediate vicinity to connect the turbines to the grid. The area is thinly settled so they don’t have to worry about people living next to the turbines, and land is relatively cheap. Most local people were probably not aware of this (myself included) and now we are getting little offers of money to let this project go on.
This is a huge, multi-million-dollar project and they want to pay personal property taxes based on little more than the scrap value of the machines. Who is making the deals here? They also want to give the community $50,000 at the onset and $20,000 for the life of the project. Well, that comes to about $2 per Mineral Countian at first, and 75 cents thereafter, for the life of the project. You could not even buy one police car for $20,000 now and what will that be worth 20 years from now?
Their plan is to sell off the project to a power company when it is completed and I wonder if the agreement will be honored by a new owner. The jobs to instalI the turbines are temporary and will be dominated by out-of-state labor due to the specialized skills required. There are projected only about four to six maintenance positions afterward.
Are we repeating history, and giving West Virginia resources away again? What local or state official can say that they are expert enough on wind power to say what our location is worth? Who will fight for Mineral Countians to get the best deal we can get? Once we sign off on this we are stuck forever with whatever deal we make.
Gregory Trainor
Keyser, W.Va.
