Image via WikipediaNot so long ago, I had no idea how easily a single reporter could hijack the voice of virtually an entire community.
Then I read a story about a community-wind project on a small island off the coast of Maine.
The story, “For Those Near, the Miserable Hum of Clean Energy,” was written by the Huffington Post’s Tom Zeller while he was still working for the New York Times.
Zeller, a talented storyteller, turned an anecdote from a Vinalhaven resident into a zinger of a lead.
Like nearly all of the residents on this island in Penobscot Bay, Art Lindgren and his wife, Cheryl, celebrated the arrival of three giant wind turbines late last year. That was before they were turned on.
“In the first 10 minutes, our jaws dropped to the ground,” Mr. Lindgren said. “Nobody in the area could believe it. They were so loud.”
Now, the Lindgrens, along with a dozen or so neighbors living less than a mile from the $15 million wind facility here, say the industrial whoosh-and-whoop of the 123-foot blades is making life in this otherwise tranquil corner of the island unbearable.
This is compelling stuff and the story was a huge hit. In fact, I would not be surprised if it has been read by more Americans than any other article about wind power in the history of the United States. Of course, I can only speculate, but it is clear that a whole heap of people read that story.
Here is the pickle. The picture Zeller paints is mostly wrong.
The noise issue is real, but it should be a footnote and not the lead. While the few facts included are accurate, the impression the piece creates for readers is recklessly misleading. I am not sure that Zeller created this impression intentionally. If you read the piece closely, it actually explains pretty persuasively why the noise issue on Vinalhaven is not all that big of a deal. Nonetheless, most people don’t read that closely and Zeller should know better.
By shamelessly sensationalizing the circumstances surrounding the wind project on Vinalhaven, Zeller has grossly distorted the public’s understanding of this project and how the vast majority of island residents feel about it.
They are proud. Very, very proud. And they should be. While the rest of the world has been talking about the potential benefit of clean energy, a small lobstering island has achieved it.
This is not to trivialize the noise issue, which is a problem for a very small number of people who live in close proximity to the wind farm. But to put this problem in perspective, many of the island residents who live as close or closer than those who have hired an attorney to represent them in regards to the noise issue are far more upset about the prospects of litigation that they are about the noise. Many of the island residents are increasingly feeling robbed of the credit they rightfully deserve for being a model of sustainability.
And I would know. Not too long ago, I was one of them. (Disclaimer: I used to be a year-round resident of Vinalhaven and am now a seasonal resident of Vinalhaven).
A week or so ago, Zeller wrote another story about the wind project on Vinalhaven for the Huffington Post. Unlike the previous article, which is hard to challenge given that Zeller includes all of the right disclaimers and caveats, the HuffPo piece is massively off the mark.
This time, I am not going to sit on the sidelines silently. Enough is enough.
Let’s take a look at this hit-job.
The new story is about a “complaint” filed with the Maine Public Utilities Commission. Zeller describes the filing like so:
The complaint charges that the Fox Island Electric Cooperative, the local utility, and Fox Island Wind, the developer of the wind installation which is owned by the utility, have engaged in repeated harassment of the homeowners, who have argued since shortly after the turbines came online in late 2009 that the machines have been in violation of state noise ordinances.
Huh? Based on Zeller’s recapitulation, you would think a civil lawsuit had been filed in a federal or state court seeking damages or some sort of injunctive relief for economic duress or coercion.
It is not. The “complaint” is more aptly described as an administrative petition requesting that the MPUC prevent Vinalhaven’s consumer-owned electric cooperative from raising the rates island residents pay for electricity. (Disclaimer: a family member belongs to the electric cooperative). The petition asks the MPUC to prevent the cooperative from raising rates. It has nothing to do with the noise issue, which is the subject of an entirely separate proceeding.
The theory is that the cooperative is raising rates not to pay the costs of completing the regulatory review resulting from the noise dispute, but to intimidate 1o specific island residents. The second theory is that the cooperative could have avoided the regulatory review related to the noise issue. Because Zeller focused on the first, I will do so too.
Ironically, at least two of the people claiming to have been the target of what Zeller describes as “repeated harassment” are not full-time island residents. Apparently, the electric cooperative on an island of slightly more than 1,000 full-time residents is powerful enough to intimidate and harass individuals residing — at least for three out of four seasons –as far away as Boston, MA and Berkeley, CA. In the latter case, the allegedly harassed cooperative customer does not even include a home address on Vinalhaven in his filing. Instead, he only provides an address and telephone number in Berkeley, California.
Based on the structure of the MPUC filing, it seems unclear if the alleged victims of intimidation and repeated harassment were even aware that this language was being used to describe their alleged grievances.
The signatures of the individuals are compiled on a duplicate of a page called “Exhibit C,” which includes a very vague two paragraphs of text. Notably, the text on that page does not use the very vivid language included in the body of the complaint. I would be very surprised if ALL of the people who signed the complaint are aware of the vivid phrasology the attorney used to describe their alleged grievances.
My guess is that the lawyers mailed or faxed most of the people separate signature pages and then compiled them to meet the jurisdictional requirement needed to file a complaint.
Of course, if these people had not signed the “Exhibit C,” the “complaint” could not have been filed. The MPUC only considers complaints if 1o or more ratepayers are involved. Why? Precisely because challenges to rate increases are so likely to be frivolous. By requiring 10 ratepayers to join, it is less likely that the MPUC will waste its resources responding to frivolous petitions.
Here is the kicker: the page they signed does not talk about being harassed or intimidated but it accuses the cooperative of violating its fiduciary duties to its members. That allegation seems like a stretch. Ironically, the cooperative would more likely have violated its fiduciary duties if it had NOT done exactly what the complaint is accusing it of doing.
Zeller describes this alleged violation of the cooperative’s fiduciary duties:
But Monday’s complaint states that the residents nearest the turbines have legitimate concerns that have long gone unheeded, despite multiple attempts to resolve the issue through negotiation, and that instead the local utility has recently upped the rhetorical ante by placing two separate “inserts” inside all islanders’ utility bills. The inserts claim that legal expenses associated with the neighbors’ noise complaints were costing the cooperative hundreds of thousands of dollars, and that as a result, a 5 percent increase in utility rates was needed.
These “inserts” are just pieces of paper that were included with the bill explaining that the cooperative needed to raise its rates by 5% and providing the reason for the rate increase. Keep in mind: the cooperative is customer-owned. So in other words, the cooperative was explaining not only to its customers that it had to raise rates but to its shareholders.
It is good policy to explain why you are charging your customers more than they expected. But, like other any entity, the cooperative almost certainly has fiduciary duties to keep its members/shareholders fully informed of material changes in its financial conditions.
The cooperative explained this very clearly in its response to the “complaint,” which is never discussed in Zeller’s article:
The Cooperative is a consumer owned utility. The Board of Directors of the Cooperative is elected directly by the Members and certain governance matters are voted upon directly by the Members. In addition, the Cooperative is currently the minority owner of Fox Islands Wind LLC, a position that will transition over time to a majority ownership position, and ultimately sole owner. Because of their position as customers and owners of Fox Islands Wind LLC, members of the Cooperative have a significant interest in matters affecting the Fox Islands Wind project. For this reason, the members have a strong interest, and indeed a right, to be informed regarding the Fox Islands Wind project. The Cooperative therefore provides regular updates to its members regarding the project.
Notably, the rebuttal to the cooperative’s response to the complaint filed by the parties trying to prevent the rate increase drops the heavy-handed language used in the complaint and focuses almost exclusively on the real dispute: a rate increase to pay for legal fees in connection with a prolonged regulatory review of the project’s compliance with noise standards.
The “complaint” indulges sensationalized phrases but backs them up with virtually no facts. In my view, the complaint is so vague that it would likely be dismissed point blank in a federal court under rule 12-b(6) of the rules of civil procedure, which requires people filing lawsuits to include specific facts in support of their allegations. Regardless, the rebuttal’s lack of heavy-handed adjectives indulged all over the complaint makes the paucity of facts included in the complaint very suspicious.
People who are not familiar with legal procedures or the mechanics of regulatory proceedings before state utility commissions are easily taken for a ride by pleadings packed with provocative phraseology regardless of its substantive relevance. Lawyers have played these games for as long as there have been lawyers.
Unfortunately, Zeller appears to have taken the bait – hook, line and sinker.
The HuffPo piece seems to be written solely from the petition without information from any other source. With the exception of the sentence where Zeller says that the majority of island residents support the wind project, there isn’t an appreciable substantive difference between the text of the complaint and the HuffPo piece – at least as far as I can tell.
In the process of writing a press release for the parties that filed the petition, Zeller does not seem to appreciate that a far more likely motivation for challenging the rate increase is to prevent the cooperative from defending itself in the noise proceeding. If rates aren’t raised, the cooperative will not be able to pay attorneys to represent the interests of the island ratepayers.
This is a tactical strategy plaintiff’s lawyers commonly pursue in civil litigation and there is no reason why that could not be happening here.
The tragedy of Zeller’s reporting is that he has missed the real story, which is far more compelling than the noise dispute. Zeller is an extraordinarily gifted writer and if he put that power into the service of the truth rather than selling copy, I would be cheering him on rather than calling him out.
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