NEVER Seen a More Dysfunctional Process’: Local Officials Decried Biden’s Top-Down Imposition of Wind Farms, Internal Docs Show
- July 17, 2024
Thomas Catenacci, Free Beacon
As the Biden administration accelerated development plans for offshore wind farms, it received vigorous pushback from several local governments in Rhode Island that accused the administration of turning a blind eye to their concerns, according to internal documents reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.
“We have NEVER seen a more dysfunctional process,” local officials wrote in a November 2022 letter addressed to the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) in which they lambasted federal officials for ignoring the concern that wind farms would ruin Rhode Island’s picturesque vistas and imposing their will like authoritarians.
The letter—obtained through a freedom of information request by the watchdog group Protect the Public’s Trust and first reported by the Washington Free Beacon—was sent by Virginia-based firm Cultural Heritage Partners on behalf of the Town of New Shoreham, Rhode Island; the City of Newport, Rhode Island; and three Rhode Island preservation society organizations.
The subject was a wind farm being constructed less than 20 miles off the coast of Block Island’s New Shoreham, known as the South Fork Wind project. The parties complained that BOEM and Interior Department leaders consulted primarily with industry officials rather than local communities and Native American tribes in an effort to push the project through and meet President Joe Biden’s ambitious offshore wind goals.
The accusations outlined in the letter and additional documents reviewed by the Free Beacon highlight the tension between Biden’s green energy agenda and the local stakeholders most impacted by the towering, landscape-altering infrastructure needed to achieve that agenda—or, as the letter puts it, the “adverse visual effects” of wind farms.
Protect the Public’s Trust director Michael Chamberlain said the administration’s actions reveal deep hypocrisy—throughout her tenure, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland has made a point of promising to incorporate local and tribal feedback into her agency’s decisions.
“Not only does it seem that in their arrogance Interior didn’t care about the rules when approving wind projects, they also didn’t appear to care about the concerns of the people they affected,” Chamberlain told the Free Beacon. “It didn’t seem that anything was going to stop them from plowing ahead—not the local communities, not the Tribes that they promised to give more input, not even other federal agencies that were supposed to be involved.”
“When Secretary Haaland promised to change the way the department dealt with the Tribes in decision making, most people probably thought she meant they would get more input,” Chamberlain said. “However, it looks like the caveat was that the Tribe had to go along with the administration.”