A neighborhood advocacy group sued the San Diego Board of Supervisors after it unanimously approved the placement of 60 wind turbines on a nearby Indian reservation.
“They had an environmental review for 72 wind turbines and we've already got another 57 north of Interstate 8 on federal land,” said Backcountry Against Dumps' Donna Tisdale. "It's hard to sell a property next to a wind turbine project because it reduces the value of your property and negates the quality of your life.”
Backcountry Against Dumps filed its lawsuit in San Diego Superior Court after the board of supervisors unanimously approved the Campo Band Indian reservation project.
“The tribal vote did not have the proper quorum required by the Campo Band's constitution," Tisdale alleges.
Tisdale lives in East County adjacent to the Campo Indian reservation where there are 25 existing wind turbines on the north side of Interstate 8.
“On an Indian reservation there's really no oversight,” Tisdale told the Southern California Record. “The county has no oversight. The state has no oversight. The feds don't have any kind of infrastructure to do oversight and the private properties and the tribal members that live around them are experiencing problems. We conducted professional tests at the homes of those who were willing and documented low-frequency noise, vibrations, and amplitude modulation, which are thumping sounds, and electrical pollution.”
iNewsource reported that the Campo Band of Diegueño Mission Indians agreed to lease land to developer Terra-Gen for some 25 years, which promises to provide clean energy to more than 70,000 homes.
“The tribal leaders are promoting the project which is something that the general members don't want,” Tisdale said in an interview. “It just impacts every aspect of your life. This is a rural area. We have very open landscapes, and now they want to put these structures that are taller than any San Diego city skyscraper out here in the middle of the country.”
She characterizes the project as being in line with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal, which aims to eliminate all U.S. carbon emissions.
“It’s a fairy tale in my opinion,” Tisdale said. “We need baseline energy. We need nuclear. We need natural gas. We're selling our natural gas to other countries who are burning it. That's our cheapest form of fuel right now and they're not allowing us to use it. It's so incredibly frustrating to me to see so many people in power not investigating what their decisions are going to do to us. They just are lemmings running off a cliff following a dream.”
She had hoped there would be some changes as a result of the lawsuit until negotiations between the two parties broke down.
“We are waiting for the next step,” Tisdale added. “We had a mediation discussion but that didn't go anywhere. So, we're waiting for a hearing to be scheduled but the courts are backed up because of the pandemic.”