The following letter is from citizen Ken Dufty for Exmore. Mr. Dufty has been closely following the Nature Conservancy’s wetlands project in Exmore.
During my 35-year career in working on environmental advocacy issues, including for my organization (Concerned Citizens for the Environment) and the Rensselaer County Legislature in Troy, New York, one of my cardinal rules for both the citizens I work with as well as myself is to never “internalize” a fight against an environmental assault. Don’t get upset. Hand wringing distracts and detracts. Just take your best shot and do as much as you can to amass an administrative record. Most of all make sure that when the dust settles, win lose or draw, you never have to say “I shoulda“. That rule has served me well.. That is until recently.
And the sticky issue that snuck through that personal closed door is the destruction of 24 acres of fertile farmland south of Exmore northbound 13 by the Nature Conservancy so that big box stores, high rises, and even industrial facilities can destroy100+ year-old established and diverse wetlands elsewhere. The scheme is called “wetland mitigation” a state and federally-sanctioned shell game on steroids, in my opinion. Even my wife Mary, who has been at my side through a lot of our work, remarked the other day that this is the first time that she has seen me let an issue we tackle affect me personally and so persistently. I agreed with her and really did not have an answer but assured her that I was trying to compartmentalize the project and put it to rest. After all, the farm field and potential homesite is gone. TNC has bulldozed a piece of valuable farmland and will take it off the tax roles while reaping $1.8 million so a big box store or what have you can, in turn, bulldoze up and cover up a formerly-protected wetland so a developer (even in Virginia Beach) can reap profits at the expense of our natural ecosystems. It’s done. But it still bugs me.
Last week I found out why, and I want to share that with you so you understand the dynamic here.
You see, in order to ready our barn for a companion horse for our lone Hafflinger, I had to clean out a stall that has been used for storage since we moved here sixteen years ago. After many, many trips to the recycling bin and take-it-or-leave it, I picked up a storage bag filled with newspaper clippings, notebooks, binders, and the like. When I did a single tattered document fell out of a slit in the side…seemingly like magic as that was the only one that escaped its otherwise sealed fate. (document attached as PDF).
Turns out it was a newsletter from my old organization regarding the first fight our community was in, one that fought the state of New York from permitting a large coal-burning plant in the Upper Hudson Valley, which just happened to be upwind from my farm. The application was submitted to the state in 1988 and, this 210 MW plant was slated to be the first of 4,000 MW planned under the 1989 State Energy Plan crafted by Governor Coal-Mo (as we dubbed him) and we were committed to make sure that never happened.
Under the power sales contract Inter-Power had with Niagara Mohawk (who really did not want to buy the power because it was too expensive in the later years), the plant had to be up and running by the end of 1993. So we knew, as a group, that delay worked for us. And we hired a team of experts to review every aspect of the plant, eventually catching the plant engineers in a number of near-fatal mistakes and miscalculations that worked in our favor.
Early on, one of our soil experts discovered that the plant was wholly designed on a FEDERALLY PROTECTED WETLAND and had not included that fact in their 15-volume application to the New York State Board on Electric Generation Siting and Environment. I verified that discovery with a few of my other experts and they concurred: the plant could not be built where they had designed it.
But we did not inform the state permitting agencies or the Administrative Law Judge about this until the hearings were underway, at which time we notified the Department of the Interior of our discovery and THEY in turn notified the ALJ that the proposed largest coal-fired cogenerator in the state had to be moved.
So the applicant had to completely scrap their original application and start over, and….after a four-year battle in administrative court and because the plant could not meet their mandatory deadline, NiMo canceled the power sales contract. In spite of that, the state issued a Certificate of Public Need and Environmental Compatibility anyway. We appealed to the Appellate Division of the NYS Supreme Court and 6 years after we started the fight to stop NYS from converting their energy mix to coal (an argument also based also climate change) we won. Our argument to the court was that, under the state permit requirements, Inter-Power had to prove that their power was “economical”. We petitioned that it could not demonstrate the plant would provide power economically into the New York Power Pool if it could not produce a power sales contract. The decision in our favor was unanimous and subsequently, coal was dead in New York State as it remains so today.
So back to that “bugs me too much” thing. Had this wetland mitigation charade by the Nature Conservancy been in effect when we were fighting NY’s transition to coal, once it was discovered that the plant was to be built on a federally-protected wetland, all Inter-Power would have had to do is write a big fat check penned to the Nature Conservancy and buy 2 acres of a fake wetland (at $100,000 acre) for every acre of a valuable and well-established wetland they could then fill in. Then shovel a million tons of coal into the chamber every year for 30 or more.
The bottom line is this. Had this unbelievably corrupt scheme been in place 35 years ago, not only would the Upper Hudson Valley of New York be an entirely different place in the context of its relatively clean environment and rural quality of life, but perhaps the precedent set by a leading state transitioning to coal at that time would have had a profound and everlasting effect nationally and even globally.
And due to a “simple twist of fate” in that horse stall last week, I would still be wondering why that dry, ruined, and bermed dry hole south of Exmore northbound bothers me so much.
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