Willis Bill Aims to Prevent Repeat of Canaan Mountain Clearing

By Kaitlin McCallum kmccallum@registercitizen.com

Willis thought she had created a solution for the problem of clear-cutting or encroachment on state, town or protected land when her bill, which became Public Act No. 06-89, passed in 2006.

But then BNE Energy, an energy company looking to build wind turbines on top of Canaan Mountain, cut down nearly 3 acres of heritage trees in the Housatonic State Forest instead of nearby private land. And the act, which offers penalties including fines up to five times the reasonable value of the trees or restoration of the land to its prior condition, was ignored.

Instead of referring the issue to the states attorney general for prosecution, Department of Energy and Environmental Protection Commissioner Daniel Esty signed a consent order allowing the company to escape the conflict with a $10,000 fine and five years of monitoring for invasive species.

The slap-on-the-wrist penalty BNE received did not fulfill what Rep. Willis and Sen. Richard Blumenthal had intended when the original bill was proposed.

When I first did the legislation on encroachment on state or preserved land, the purpose was to ensure that land was restored if damages were done - they could get the property back to where it once was and the penalties were up to five times the value of the trees, so they were pretty stiff, Willis explained. But the problem was the case of Canaan Mountain, which was never referred to the attorney general. DEEP believed that they had the ability to do a consent decree so they went ahead and settled for what people feel was a lot less than warranted by the kind of destruction done.

The Berkshire Litchfield Environmental Council has been protecting Canaan Mountain from developers, utility companies and the state since the 1970s, its president Starling Childs said, and when the forest was damaged by BNE, the group took up the fight.

BLEC filed suit against the DEEP commissioner, charging that Esty side-stepped the law in issuing the consent order and that the settlement with BNE should be thrown out. Attorney General George Jepsen adamantly defended the DEEP action and BLEC was denied.

The group filed an appeal in December of 2013.

It has dragged on, Childs said. The court ruled in favor of the attorney generals argument. They narrowly interpreted the statute and the fact that we had brought this action, rather than addressing the environmental crime that had been committed. Continued...

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Willis Bill Aims to Prevent Repeat of Canaan Mountain Clearing