Almost ten years ago I remember reporting on the creation of the windmill farm on the hillsides near Huntington.

Fred Warner was the chairman of the Baker County Board of Commissioners. Together with a man named Randy Joseph, who’d moved here from the upper Midwest, Warner introduced the idea of a hydro-electric project at Mason Dam. This idea was pushed for several months and then it was dropped and I never heard another word about it.

Not long after dropping the idea of a hydro-electric dam, Joseph and Warner began talking about allowing Joseph to use public land to construct a windmill facility. The power created through the windmills is sold to the electric companies and those companies are required to purchase the energy. It is an expensive process and electric rate payers pick up the increased cost while the windmill owners rake in huge amounts of money. The incentive behind the energy purchase requirement is of course “climate change” or as it was once called “global warming.”

Several years after securing the public land for his windmill project, Randy Joseph died and the windmill facility went to Randy’s son, Loran. As far as I can tell, the arrangement with the windmills benefitting this one family appears to be in perpetuity.

I had planned to attend a county commissioner meeting here in the near future to present a request to be granted use of public land within the county to construct a solar voltaic facility to capture energy from sunlight and then to collect the proceeds after selling the energy to the electric companies. My request would have been a rhetorical request to try and point out how unfair it is for one family to benefit so much from their exclusive use of the public land outside Huntington.

Then I began thinking and putting the City of Baker City’s funding shortfalls into a new perspective. Funding sources for the city are extremely limited and the situation isn’t going to get better anytime in the future. First, I think the city officials should approach the Joseph family and ask them to donate their private wind project on public lands to the city. It is conceivable that the wind project has most certainly helped with the establishment of the Josephs’ bakery on Main Street and maybe the family could scrape by with just their inheritance and the bakery. I use the word “inheritance” because part of that inheritance should not be the windmill project on public lands.

I doubt very seriously that the Josephs would give up their windmills for the betterment of the community, so what is keeping the city, or any private citizen from starting their own energy creation project on public land within Baker County? The electric companies are forced to purchase the energy. Baker City’s coffers have been emptied during the past 15 years. An electric generating facility might provide the city an opportunity to catch up and replace the millions of dollars that only 15 years ago sat securely (not so securely as it turns out) within the city’s bank accounts.

I witnessed the head of the county planning commission, Alice Trindle, argue adamantly in favor of Randy Joseph’s windmill proposal. I doubt she’d argue with the same conviction if it were me applying for such a use of public land. But, the power of the city, the degree of the city’s need, and the planning department’s precedent-setting decision to allow a private citizen to construct an energy facility on public land puts the city in a strong position for obtaining huge areas of public lands to construct energy creation facilities.

Brian Addison

Baker City