Nantucket’s Town Meeting Votes Down Latest Turbine

Nantucket’s special town meeting of October 22, 2012 dispatched the latest wind proposal–a 100 kw turbine in Madaket–by an overwhelming voice vote.

Barbara Gookin’s citizen petition to appropriate $620,000 for a 100 kilowatt wind turbine at the Madaket landfill was overwhelmingly defeated.
7:05 p.m. The Madaket wind turbine citizen petition, Article 5, was overwhelmingly defeated on a voice vote. A hand count was called for, but the sea of hands in the air to vote “no” led moderator Sarah Alger to declare the two-thirds majority against the proposal.

Jason Graziadei, reporting for the Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror, describes an especially large turnout of 632 people (7.5 percent of Nantucket’s total of 8,389 registered voters). Photo credit: Jim Powers.
Common Sense Nantucket  (CSN) reports that member Karen Palmer addressed the meeting to explain how unsound the financial picture was for that turbine.

CSN hopes that the Town of Nantucket can now finally come together and work on energy efficiency and energy conservation to reduce our overall need and delay or eliminate the need for a third submarine electric cable from the mainland.  The only way we can avoid a third cable is through these measures, not by spending huge amounts of money on inefficient wind turbines.

To view the educational materials Common Sense Nantucket created, click the links below: