Town of Cape Vincent Supervisor Tells BP's Chandler he is putting the proverbial cart before the horse.

December 30, 2012
Mr. Richard Chandler
Director, Business Development
BP Wind Energy
700 Louisiana Street, Floor 33
Houston, Texas 77002

Re: Case l 2-F-0410 Cape Vincent Wind Power

Dear Mr. Chandler:

Regarding your request for written confirmation of our meeting date and time, our meeting is scheduled for January 22 at 10:00 AM at our Rec Park facility. We intend the meeting to be a work session and not a forum. It will include Cape Vincent and Lyme officials, and we anticipate give and take vs. formal presentations. We will have a lunch served during the session and expect the meeting will continue in to the afternoon.

You state in your December 21 letter that you are "interested in eliciting specific local interests" for consideration when you again visit Cape Vincent in January. Among the areas of likely local interest you mention location and design, local public involvement, property taxes, payments in lieu of taxes, and highway work associated with your proposed project. Other details you mentioned include the potential for incremental operating and infrastructure costs incurred for police services, fire services, emergency services, water, sewer, solid waste disposal, and highway maintenance and other municipal services during construction and operations phases. In contrast to these detailed points in your PIP you mention the broad, general topics of potential negative impacts, adequacy of studies to address those impacts and applicability of our local law. The details you describe in your letter, however, are putting the proverbial cart before

the horse.

To discuss these matters at our January meeting, while BP is still in a public involvement phase of your proposal, and before any formal scoping process has commenced, strikes us as not only premature but highly presumptuous on your part. Should we be even talking about a construction and operation phase for a proposed project which is still only proposed and a long way from being understood, much less approved? It seems to us that BP has much more groundwork to do before it is anywhere near timely to be discussing such matters as fire services and solid waste disposal, etc.

Mr. Chandler, we are puzzled as to how you think it might be possible to productively engage in discussions on these and other matters without first having the benefit of a full range specific details regarding your proposal. All we really have is a poorly done map with little information other than 124 red dots within the boundaries of the Town of Cape Vincent. In our written communications to BP Wind Power, our face-to-face meeting and open house with you in Cape Vincent, and in our several written and publicly posted communications to the New York State Siting Board staff, we have repeatedly expressed our frustration over the poor details provided by BP for this project proposal and the lack of specificity in your development plans. In a very real sense we are operating in the dark, while you have the benefit of controlling the light.

Your letter does not in any way reflect or even acknowledge your appreciation of our ongoing difficulties in understanding the full scope and nature of your proposal for Cape Vincent and Lyme. If part of your purpose in wishing to come to Cape Vincent in January is to inform us more fully about the proposed location and design of your project, we would welcome that. We would also welcome discussing the issues mentioned in your revised PIP - namely the listing of potentially negative impacts, studies to assess their impacts and those parts of our local law you will be requesting that the Siting Board extinguish.

In your letter you mentioned the need to identify all of Cape Vincent's potentially applicable local laws and regulations. As you are aware all such laws are posted on the town's website and fully available for your review and study. In fact, after having reviewed our draft zoning law you sent us a letter on June 27 stating, " the provisions contained within the Proposed Zoning Law are unreasonably burdensome." If BP continues to hold this then on January 22 BP should be telling us specifically what parts of our law you will ask the Siting Board to supplant.

If part of your purpose for you visit to Cape Vincent in January is for you to better understand how you could improve your public involvement efforts, you need read the several publicly posted letters on that specific matter that we have provided to New York Siting Board staff. In those letters we have identified numerous specific shortcomings in BPs public outreach work to date.

In the closing line of your letter, Mr. Chandler, you say that you look forward to continuing dialogue regarding your project. We would suggest that true dialogue regarding your proposal (not yet a "project") has really not yet commenced. For dialogue to continue it must first begin. We do look forward to candid discussions with you on the substantive matters necessary for our evaluation of your proposal.

Respectfully yours,

Urban Hirschey - Supervisor