Co-op City residents, elected officials push against wind turbine following machinery’s collapse

Elected officials, city agencies and Co-op City residents discussed Wednesday the future of the wind turbine that came crashing down on Bartow Avenue last month.

News 12 Staff

Jan 30, 2020, 3:10 AM

Updated 1,541 days ago

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Elected officials, city agencies and Co-op City residents discussed Wednesday the future of the wind turbine that came crashing down on Bartow Avenue last month.
The elected officials said they are not against clean energy, but stressed they are against developers who are not cognizant of the areas they are building in because there are wind turbines in New York City industrial areas.
The wind turbine was installed in mid-December and partially collapsed about two weeks later onto an unoccupied car. The turbine also brought down a digital billboard with it.
No one was hurt, but residents and elected officials want to prevent something similar from ever happening again.
An amusement park once stood on the property, and the reason the tall turbine was built is because the zoning laws were never changed.
Now Sen. Jamaal Bailey and Assemblyman Michael Benedetto have come together to draft legislation.
"One, is to stop any wind turbine from being built within 1,500 feet of either a residential area or commercial area… And the second piece is simply about large billboards and the annoyance factor behind them, making sure that these billboards have certain and comport to certain regulations with size, brightness and things of that nature,” Bailey said.
The Department of Buildings was also on the panel at the town hall and received numerous of complaints from residents for allowing the massive turbine to be built. The DOB, however, stressed it was able to issue the permits under the scope of the law.


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