By Curt Peterson, Standard Correspondent
For Green Mountain Power, silence apparently means support.
Neighbors haven’t registered complaints about a proposed 27,000-panel solar array GMP has planned on Quechee-Hartland Road at a site which has operated as a sand and gravel pit since 1964.
Angry neighbors have twice foiled Green Mountain Power’s attempt to develop a major solar energy project in Windsor County. But at an Oct. 19 public hearing for the Quechee-Hartland Road project, very few people showed up, and no one voiced opposition to the 47-acre project. According to Lee Adams, present owner of the property, GMP also invited the public to the site to hear and see what the company has planned, and no one showed up.
“We have had overwhelming support for this project,” said Kristin Carlson, director of media and chief corporate spokesperson for GMP. Proposals to build solar farms behind a cemetery in Taftsville and next to the prison in Windsor were notoriously rejected by their residents in the prospective host towns, mostly for aesthetic reasons.
Carlson described the Hartford project as a 4.77-megawatt power generator of 8,800-megawatt hours of electricity — enough to power 1,200 homes.
GroSolar, a design-build solar contractor in White River Junction, is GMP’s partner in the plan, which is anticipated to cost about $13 million to develop. The town of Hartford and GMP have estimated the tax revenue from the finished project to be $20,000 in state education taxes and $50,000 in real estate taxes. Besides municipal approval, Two Rivers Ottauquechee Resources Council, the regional planning group, has no objections to GMP’s proposal.
Adams said he thinks GMP has all the approvals and permits they need to start construction in April. The project is scheduled for completion in the fall of 2016.
Marty Banak, who lives in the general area and who canoes and kayaks on North Hartland Lake, laments that the view from the lake will change with the building of so many solar cells.
“Now, when you look up into the hills, you can’t see any sign of human habitation – it’s all just trees and mountains and sky. When the solar project is finished and the sun hits all those panels, they’ll look hideous.”
Banak says he’s not against the project, but he’s sorry the pristine view from the lake will, in his opinion, be spoiled. He was unable to attend the public hearing, but did have a conversation with Matt Osbourne in the Hartford town offices.
“I suggested GMP be required to put up some kind of berm, or barrier blocking the sight of the panels from the lake,” he said. He also spoke to someone at the Army Corps of Engineers office at the lake, but he isn’t confident anything will come from his efforts.
Lee Adams lives on the property and is looking forward to the sale, which he expects will close in April. He said he bought the pit from the previous owner about 22 years ago and business was great.
“It worked out for me because I had suffered a bad forklift truck accident and ended up with two prosthetic feet,” he said. “We lost two houses we owned in Newport, New Hampshire and my sister loaned me the money to buy the gravel pit, which was originally part of my grandfather’s farm.”
“When they developed Quechee Lakes they decided to bury all the utilities,” he said. “But it was all ledge up there. After they chiseled the ditch for the wires, they used my sand to fill in the trenches. They bought a lot of sand!”
Adams said the recession and the end of QL development slowed business to a standstill.
Next-door neighbor Janice Nadeau lives in the house and has the barns that were originally part of the farm too.
At one time Adams’s grandson was a serious dirt bike racer, and he set up a regular dirt bike racetrack so his grandson and his friends could have competitions. That stopped when the boy outgrew dirt bikes. Since then the only non-extraction activity at the pit is when hunters come before deer season to sight in their rifles.
“I let anyone who asks permission do it,” he said. “Only two have asked and done it so far this year.”
Adams doesn’t allow actual hunting, as his wife objects to animals being killed on the property.
Banak, who objected to the solar project’s effect on the view from the Lake, said, “I have to admit the solar panels are preferable to dirt bike racing or a rifle range.”
Residents and visitors to the area will have noticed the ten-foot-tall robot that stands at the entry to the sand pit, a conglomeration of metal parts and hoses from which a black mailbox is held out. It looks as if it was designed to travel around on tracks with its arms and legs moving. An old sign leans on it announcing, “Grandpa’s Gravel Pit”.
“I made it to look functional,” said Adams, “but it isn’t.”
He said when he was a kid he and his friends used to go around on Halloween bashing mailboxes with baseball bats from a pickup truck or car window.
“Kids still do that. After I lost three mailboxes I made the robot to hold my fourth. It’s quite…heavy. When a kid hits it, he knows he’s hit something! He gets quite a sting! I keep finding broken bats and dented 2-by-4s on the ground, left there by unsuspecting kids with sore hands.”
This article first appeared in the November 5, 2015 edition of the Vermont Standard.