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Wind Farm Settlement Meeting Postponed

Thu, 10/10/2019 - 13:05
Deepwater Wind South Fork plans to build a 15-turbine offshore wind installation some 35 miles from Montauk.
Christopher Walsh

Tuesday’s meeting to begin negotiations on a settlement between the developers of the proposed South Fork Wind Farm and the New York State Public Service Commission was canceled after East Hampton Town and state officials objected to its location and to what an attorney representing the town said was unreasonably short notice. The meeting has yet to be rescheduled.

The meeting was to have been held at the State Department of Public Service’s offices in Albany. After objections from Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc, Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele, and State Senator Kenneth P. LaValle, the wind farm’s developers, Orsted U.S. Offshore Wind and Eversource Energy, secured a space late last week at the Marine Science Center at Stony Brook Southampton, from which stakeholders could participate in the negotiations by teleconference.

Orsted U.S. Offshore Wind and Eversource Energy, which jointly plan to construct and operate the South Fork Wind Farm some 35 miles off Montauk, had filed notice with the commission last month to begin settlement negotiations in the commission’s review of their application to install the wind farm’s export cable in state waters and on the subterranean path to a Long Island Power Authority substation in East Hampton.

The developers had applied to the commission in September 2018 for a certificate of environmental compatibility and public need, required to install the wind farm’s export cable in state waters and on an underground route from the ocean beach at the end of Beach Lane in Wainscott to a Long Island Power Authority substation near Cove Hollow Road in East Hampton, about 4.1 miles. 

Holding negotiations more than 250 miles from the community most affected by the proposed project created a hardship for “locally based parties to this proceeding” to take part in it, elected officials wrote last week in their joint statement to the commission.

Justice Anthony Belsito, an administrative law judge, ruled in their favor on Oct. 2, and the remote site was secured. But a letter from the town’s counsel to the administrative judge on Friday expressed “strenuous objection” to the scheduling of the negotiations in Albany, as well as “the recent provision of only one alternative facility for participation” in the negotiations. The Southampton site, wrote John Wagner, representing the town, is several miles from where “numerous parties and other persons interested in the subject case work or reside, and [. . .] is not convenient” to many of them.

In addition, scheduling the meeting “upon only two weeks prior notice does not afford any person or parties in the negotiations reasonable time for preparation,” Mr. Wagner wrote, particularly since the Sept. 24 letter from Orsted-Eversource’s counsel scheduling the meeting described the negotiations as involving “settlement of all issues relating to the issuance” of the certificate of environmental compatibility and public need. “This non-specific statement of issues,” Mr. Wagner wrote of the Sept. 24 letter, “does not allow for any meaningful preparation for discussion of the many and serious specific issues involved in the subject application.”

Tuesday’s meeting would also have conflicted with a town board work session in Montauk, which had been noticed on the town’s website for some time, Mr. Wagner continued. “Participation of town board members in the settlement negotiations, at even the alternative site, will require them to remove themselves prematurely from other important town business.”

Mr. Wagner reiterated the local officials’ call for settlement negotiations to take place in East Hampton, suggesting that “technologically-advanced facilities” at Town Hall are available and would allow residents and other stakeholders “fullest participation in the negotiations.”


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