The year in solar power

A town turns it down, as a school puts it up

By FRITZ MAYER

JEFFERSONVILLE, NY — A story that ran in this paper in the first month of 2009 carried the headline “Callicoon Compromise.” The compromise was that the Town of Callicoon board had agreed to go forward with creating a solar project to produce electricity.

The project would have been less ambitious than the one first proposed by supervisor Linda Babicz. But, it would have still been a sizable installation and would have been mostly paid for by funds provided by Assemblywoman Aileen Gunther and incentives from the state.

The agreement was achieved after town board members brought up repeated objections about the project. They said that a solar installation on the town barn roof might be knocked out of commission by an errant foul ball from the baseball field across the street. They said that it would not be right to accept state money when the state was struggling with a tough economic situation. Perhaps, most importantly, they said that solar technology does not operate efficiently enough in this climate to be worth the investment.

These arguments came in the same year in which five farms in western Sullivan County and two maple-sugar facilities received solar installations with funds from the state. The arguments against solar came during the same year in which the Sullivan County government instituted a Sustainability and Policy Committee and began a program to study retrofits to all county-owned buildings, including some solar installations.

Many residents expressed the view that the Republican town board members, Tom Bose, Harold Fuchs and Dave Kuebler, were opposed to the project because it was initiated by Babicz, a Democrat.

The board members insisted their concerns were legitimate and, in fact, so valid that they decided not to go forward with the compromise. Another story about the project ran in the middle of April with the headline “Callicoon solar project dead.”

The town lost some $210,000 that it would have received from the state. Babicz, at the time, charged that the defeat of the project was the result of “petty politics.” In November, Bose beat Babicz in the election for the supervisor’s office.

Ironically, a building just a few blocks away from the town hall will now likely be the first public building to be fitted with a solar installation. In early December, officials from the Sullivan West school district were informed that they had been approved to receive funding of about $250,000 to pay for a solar installation on the roof of the Jeffersonville Elementary School. Much of the funding is coming from the federal government through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Larry Lawrence, the assistant superintendent for business at the district, said the project won’t be happening right away because it must go through the process of approval by the New York State Board of Education, but it may be operational by the end of 2010.