At the last week’s meeting of the Board of Selectmen, an attorney for Quarry Hills made it clear that they would contest the town’s ability to access the site for construction of a wind turbine. They believe that the turbine will have a detrimental impact on their business, the Granite Links Golf Course. The selectmen do not agree there will be an adverse impact and at their meeting last night they unanimously passed a motion to add an article to the warrant that will ask Town Meeting to approve using “Eminent Domain” to ensure access to the site. Eminent Domain being the power of the government to appropriate property for public use.

In doing this the board will hopefully avoid a legal tussle with Quarry Hills. As the board noted, the land belongs to the town and the rights granted to other stakeholders will remain in place (i.e. Quarry Hills and National Grid.) Following is a map of the site. Click on the image to view a larger version.

In a comment to our previous post on this issue, Mr. Shields writes:

“We do this on advise from our town counsel, John Flynn, and his associates at Murphy,Hesse,Toomey, and Lehane. John and his colleagues worked through a number of options available for the town with regard to the access problem with Quarry Hills. The Board, with our town administrator and our town planner went over all the options with Mr. Flynn and Attorney Graham from John’s office. We think this solution is the best because it is clear and unambiguous in the end who has access.”

You can read the post and the full text of Mr. Shields comment here.

The board also unanimously passed motions to add two other articles:

• to appropriate $138,000 to initially finance a Consolidated Facilities Department. This would enable a director to be hired. Tom Hurley, Chairman of the Warrant Committee, remarked that this was the recommendation of the consultant the town hired to evaluate the feasibility of forming this department. The director is an important first step and would work with town officials is structuring the department further. The department will likely be staffed largely by existing personnel. It was also noted that the School Committee needs to vote on this.
• a Chapter 13 set aside regarding employees who are not currently members of any union.