Time To Spill The Matt Fee Tea

To the editor: All anyone needs to do is head to Surfside, or any of our south shore beaches, and look at the overwhelming Vineyard Wind project to understand what the negative impacts from these first 50 turbines - and the hundreds more in the pipeline -will have upon our ocean, marine life, and island. The size and scale of the turbines, their blinking lights, the likelihood of more blade-failure pollution, and the negative impacts on Nantucket, a National Historic Landmark, are a disgrace. Anyone who’d say that they’d still - even now – sign an agreement to take money and some standard mitigations in exchange for supporting Vineyard Wind (VW) - instead of Nantucket - isn’t listening to the community and isn’t using common sense. Sadly, last Monday at the Civic League's summer forum, that’s exactly what Select Board member Matt Fee did. In fact, he also said that the Good Neighbor Agreement [GNA] is “good for us….and if we cancel it, our chances of getting those [Aircraft Detection Lighting System a.k.a. ADLS] lights put up are zero”.

Sorry, Matt. That’s just not true. Vineyard Wind is contractually bound with the state of Massachusetts to install ADLS. The GNA is irrelevant here.

I have spoken to Matt on this issue many times and, as he’s a native islander, I appreciate his point of view. But it is baffling that someone with his Nantucket roots would say anything positive about the Good Neighbor Agreement, especially at this point. Consensus seems to say Vineyard Wind is not a good neighbor and frankly, some might even call them a very bad neighbor. According to the Select Board itself, VW has literally ignored the town since February. Let’s face it, Nantucket has no relationship with Vineyard Wind, and it’s misleading to pretend otherwise.

At Monday's forum, Matt gave fellow Select Board member Brooke Mohr credit for her work regarding the town’s response to the blade failure and also touted the many relationships Brooke has forged since. According to Matt, these relationships have been “very helpful for the Town”. Hmmm, that’s debatable:

After the community asked for answers for six months after the July 2024 blade fail, we were finally notified by the Select Board last Christmas Eve that we’d been given roughly one week (over the busiest family holiday week of the year) to submit questions for a Q&A with the agency “BSEE”. A meeting was, at last, set for Jan 14, 2025. Despite the unreasonable timing, the public responded with more than 500 questions! But, alas, that long-awaited meeting was “postponed”. As the new date approached, the meeting was again, postponed… “indefinitely” this time. One year later? Still no meeting, still no plan for a meeting, and still no answers about the blade fail, its root cause, or why Vineyard Wind has been allowed to proceed. We still don’t know which blades have been replaced or anything about the alleged fraud at their supplier, GE Vernova, plant in Canada. Is that what Matt meant when he said Brooke has forged relationships that are “very helpful for the Town”? Or maybe he was referring to the relationships that helped make our latest agreement with supplier GE Vernova - the agreement that infuriatingly also lets Vineyard Wind completely off the hook without paying us a dime for the blade fail?

Matt was correct Monday when he said, “Libby [Gibson] has no magic button under her desk that can stop these projects”. I think he should give the community a little more credit here…I’m pretty sure we all know that there are no magic buttons, anywhere. However, if Matt really wanted to help stop these projects, he should be communicating that ‘public opposition’ plays a major role in killing projects like these. He and the Select Board should share with our community and our state and federal legislators exactly what the town has claimed in several legal documents about offshore wind: these projects will bring harm to Nantucket’s tourism economy, will harm our town’s financial well-being and tax base, and compromise Nantucket’s history and character, among other things. The Select Board should also share that offshore wind isn’t “green," isn’t going to move the needle on climate change, is extremely expensive, and that it compromises radar and potentially national security.

I am hopeful that Matt, as one of the original signers of the Good Neighbor Agreement and as someone who has been involved with Vineyard Wind from the very beginning, will listen to his Select Board Chair, Dawn Holdgate, when she says about VW, “…the impact is far, far greater than what we were led to believe…”. We couldn’t agree more.

Amy DiSibio
ACK for Whales