Bachler ignores town’s needs

"Reckless" describes the actions of Frank Bachler, Meredith town supervisor.

Bachler ignored 825 resident-signed letters asking for a ban on industrial wind turbines. He also ignored and tossed away like trash more than a year of meticulous, carefully crafted, sensible research; the same guidance Bachler personally requested from the Meredith Planning Board. Much of this recommendation stems from European experience over the last two decades; guidance designed to protect the citizens of Meredith from the personal and environmental damage actually experienced by people and animals who live in the flickering shadow of industrial wind development.

In search of a buck, at the expense of the public, Bachler arbitrarily replaced the board’s recommendation with one based on the developers’ wishes. The new law is based not on public health, welfare and safety, but instead caves in to wind industry specifications, designed to maximize developers’ profits.

With clouded vision, blinded by money and recklessly uninformed, Bachler is leading Meredith down a frightening and uncertain path to the future with the most liberal pro-industrial wind law ever proposed in New York.

The irony of this travesty is the small sum of money Bachler is willing to accept in exchange for selling out Meredith. Typically, a wind developer pays less than 2 percent of a project’s total revenue to the leaseholders and the town. If Bachler has his way, our beautiful Meredith will be sold out to big business and Wall Street for pennies on the dollar.

Bachler’s legacy, a short-sighted, reckless gamble with Meredith’s future, will be a ruined economy and landscape _ all in exchange for the dubious promises of slightly lowered taxes, questionable leaseholder paychecks, and unenforceable performance standards.

Now’s the time to protect your health, independence and property rights. Please stand up and take action against Bachler before it’s too late.

Robert Lidsky

Andes
Lidsky owns property in Meredith.

What surprises me is that there has been very little protest in this country. The country keeps heading further and further into fascism and the public, by and large, doesn’t seem to know it or care. Hitler had his Reichstag fire and the U.S. had its 9/11, and in both cases those events were the opening for fascism through rule by decree.

A new, blatant example has occurred. Bush recently signed a document that makes him dictator if there’s a "catastrophic emergency"; and he is the only one empowered by this document to declare the emergency. But the country has hardly heard of it, and when it does, most people won’t care very much.

The reason most people won’t understand the danger of this document is because education in this country is terrible _ not because of the teachers, who are, by and large, fine, but because of the curriculum, which is not geared for an informed democracy. Politicians, ruled by corporations, want more science and engineering education to serve the corporations. Science and engineering don’t say anything about democracy.

We’re paying for public ignorance, and we’ll probably pay more in the future. An ignorant public can be easily manipulated by propaganda, as now. Tragically, it accepts propaganda _ spin _ as fact and truth. Even those who are supposedly well-educated _ some even with Ph.Ds _ are blind to the effects that propaganda has on them. That’s why a rogue like Bush can remain in office, ruining this country and its cherished Constitution every day. And his acolytes cannot recognize that the man is pure evil.

Martin Wank