The power of neighborhood

The plot is an old one, invoked in countless books and movies: Giant corporation seeks to buy up land in order to exploit it for its (fill in the blank) value, offers outrageous sums of money to (usually impoverished) current landowners, pits neighbor against neighbor and either gets run out of town or prevails. But now, that real-life movie is playing in my state. The big corporation in this case is Hydro-Quebec, the world’s largest producer of hydroelectric energy, and it seeks to run a huge transmission line down the backbone of New Hampshire so it can sell power not to folks in this state but to locales SOUTH of here. This weekend, I spent some time with my friends Daryl and Brad and heard for the first time about how some of the New Hampshirites in the path of the proposed pass have been reacting to the plan. And that would be, not well. Three or so years ago, Daryl and Brad built their dream house in Colebrook, N.H., on a site chosen for its remoteness, hunting opportunities, beauty and privacy. They’d barely had a chance to get fully unpacked when they learned that Hydro-Quebec was planning this project, and that Northern Pass towers would march right across their front yard if it went through. So they did want many leading characters in such dramas do – they decided to fight, and to reach out to their neighbors (many of whom they’d never met) to join them. That’s how they met an elderly woman I’ll call Ella, who lives on just hundreds of dollars a month but would rather spit in her shoe than accept the $800,000-plus Hydro-Quebec was willing to give her for her modest property. And a farmer down the road who was offered more than a million for his property but declined, saying he wouldn’t know what to do with a million dollars but he sure knew what to do with the land he’d grown up on. Daryl and Brad themselves have hosted neighbors and state lawmakers for meetings to talk about ways to fight the plan – and to remind themselves there is strength in solidarity. While Hydro-Quebec tells homeowners who refuse to sell that they might end up staring at towers anyway, without the money some of their neighbors have accepted, the hold-outs tell each other that if enough of them say no, the project cannot proceed. Rick and I went through a smaller-scale version of such a battle years back, when a developer was threatening to put in a 13-unit subdivision next to us, practically using a shoe-horn to maximize the number of buildings he could fit on the acreage. We gathered neighbors together, looked for opportunities to fight, learned that the land had once been sprayed with lead arsenate when it was an orchard and passed that information on to our Planning Board. When the developer learned how much it would cost to clean up the lead arsenate, he high-tailed it and the property is now under easement and can never be developed. The power of neighborhood. May it work for the likes of Daryl, Brad, Ella and whomever else holds respect for the land above money.