A controversial wind farm would ruin the countryside and lead to a forest of turbines being built across the Powys/Shropshire border, councillors have claimed.

Powys County Council unanimously objected to a planning application for nine wind turbines near Dolfor, Newtown, claiming it would industrialise a historic and beautiful landscape.

The council's planning committee listed seven reasons for its objection, including an unacceptable impact on the character of the landscape, especially on Glog Hill, the Kerry Ridgeway and the Shropshire Hills Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, an unacceptable visual impact on many public rights of way and other land especially Glyndwr's Way and the Kerry Hill ridge and an unacceptable adverse impact on cultural heritage assets.

They also said they had insufficient information to demonstrate that noise can be managed, that the development would not have an unacceptable adverse impact on highway safety, that a safe access from the A483 could be secured to serve the proposed development and on the impact on biodiversity.

Applicant RWE Innogy UK Ltd has appealed to the Planning Inspectorate on the grounds of non-determination and the councillors agreed to give delegated powers to the councils development management with the chairman and vice chairman of planning to amend or withdraw objections reasons if extra information be provided.

Members who visited the site before the meeting, were told the nine turbines proposed would be erected on land south of Dolfor and near to Llanbadarn Fynydd incorporating some common and crown land.

The turbines would have a maximum tip height of 126m and there would also be a substation, anemometer mast, access tracks and a construction compound.

Construction will take about 16 months and the life of the windfarm would be 20 to 25 years.

Objections were received from many consultees including Natural Resources Wales, Montgomeryshire and Radnorshire Wildlife Trusts, Transport Wales, Powys Highways, Cadw, various community councils across the area and 138 letters were received from members of the public.

The committee heard from Councillor John Brunt who said this was the seventh application in a small area and if approved it would set a precedent, setting off an avalanche of applications leading to a forest of wind turbines.

Link:
'Forest of turbines' fear over Shropshire border windfarm plan

MOREHOUSE PARISH (KTVE/KARD) -- The Morehouse Parish School District had been trying to form a budget reduction plan since February.

Even as recently as Fall 2013, they were talking about declaring a general fund emergency.

Now, administrators said the dust has settled and even though the landscape of the district has changed, school leaders said it will take them into the future.

A new reality is settling in for the Morehouse Parish School District.

No one was at work on Monday, beginning a new four-day school and work week, part of a budget reduction plan that took months to approve.

The school board last Tuesday approved a more than $42 million budget, putting them back in the green, according to the superintendent.

"It came from a lot of hard work, a lot of sacrifices that were made by everyone here in Morehouse Parish. Everybody had to give up of something," said Superintendent Dr. George Noflin.

To save the more than $3 million they needed, 36 positions were cut from the district.

Many employees took a one-month cut from their salaries.

Elementary school grades were consolidated, making schools like Henry V. Adams and Cherry Ridge only Pre-K through 2nd Grade schools and Oak Hill and Pine Grove only 3rd through 5th Grade schools.

Originally posted here:
Budget Approved, New Reality Begins for Morehouse Parish Schools

A controversial winery project near Yountville won narrow approval from county planners on July 2 after a contentious hearing and some public wavering by a key planning commission member.

The hearing on the 100,000-gallon winery project proposed to be built on Yountville Hill unfolded much like a heavyweight boxing match opponents trading arguments with the developers, but neither side scoring a decisive knockout.

That initially left the commissioners split at the end of a marathon five-hour meeting before an overflow crowd, with Commissioners Matt Pope and Terry Scott saying they opposed the project because its production was too great and its marketing plan too aggressive for a 10.9-acre parcel off Highway 29 and south of Yount Mill Road.

Commissioners Bob Fiddaman and Mike Basayne said they were in favor, and Commissioner Heather Phillips recused herself due to a conflict of interest, leaving a 2-2 deadlock and spelling defeat for the winery. Before the commission could vote formally, however, Eric Sklar, developer of the proposed Yountville Hill Winery, asked for a two-week delay to possibly revise the project and win over votes.

After a brief recess to discuss the delay, the commissioners returned and Pope said he would change his vote. By a 3-1 margin, with Scott opposed, the commission voted to approve the projects use permit to the stunned silence of the roughly 50 people left in attendance, almost all of them opposing the winery.

Pope prefaced his initial comments opposing Yountville Hill by saying he was deeply torn about the project, believing some of the vintners who wrote letters opposing it were saying I got mine, now too bad for you. He also believed that by making it difficult and prohibitively expensive for winery developers, the county was narrowing the pool of new winery owners to large corporations with the deep pockets to navigate the process.

Still, he said he was swayed by the arguments that Yountville Hill could be a precedent-setting decision for Napa Valley, in essence allowing developers to pursue large-production projects that need lots of tasting room customers, nestled into narrow parcels in the hillsides.

Pope said comments from commission Chairman Bob Fiddaman ultimately changed his mind, as Fiddaman argued that the commissioners were bound by the countys existing interpretations of the laws and, therefore, had to approve the winery.

This was the most ambivalent Ive ever been, Pope said shortly before changing his vote. I am in support of this project, and that is my decision.

Tod Mostero, who had helped organize neighborhood opposition to Yountville Hill, said he was disappointed in the decision, and opponents were strongly considering appealing to the Napa County Board of Supervisors. Lester Hardy, an attorney working with Sklar on the project, said he expects one to be filed.

Visit link:
County planners OK controversial Yountville Hill winery project

For years, Beth McGuinn picked up fresh vegetables and produce from the Dimond Hill Farm in Concord during her commute to work.

At the farm last week, she wore a pair of hiking boots and examined a trail map outlining the 7-mile mile path winding from Dimond Hill, through Rossview Farm, to Carter Hill Orchard.

Its really doable, she said, looking at the wooden trail sign erected beside the farmstand.

Over the past several years, the Five Rivers Conservation Trust has preserved Carter Hill Orchard and Dimond Hill Farm under conservation easements, which protects the land from development, opens up trails for public use and maintains the farmland where local agriculture can flourish for decades to come, McGuinn said.

Its a community farm. People know Dimond Hill, she said. It is available to be a farm forever. Its really special.

McGuinn is now at the helm of the Concord-based conservation organization as its first-ever full-time executive director. She takes over at a time when the nonprofit has grown at a rapid pace: over the past four years, Five Rivers has nearly doubled its number of property easements, from 36 to 61.

With extensive experience in forestry and land conservation, McGuinn hopes to expand on Five Riverss success conserving open land in the Concord area, keeping a special eye on farms.

When you are preserving prime agricultural soils, that is . . . a public benefit,

she said. We have seen an increase in interest in local foods and its really important to be able to source at least some of your food locally.

Five Rivers Conservation Trust launched in 1998 as the Concord Conservation Trust, but in 2002 changed its name and expanded its mission. Five Rivers refers to the nonprofits geographic focus, between the Merrimack, Contoocook, Blackwater, Warner and Soucook Rivers, including Concord, Hopkinton, Bow, Hillsboro, Dunbarton and 10 more towns.

See the rest here:
Deep roots

SAN JOSE -- They were the Nia, the Pinta and the Santa Maria of Space Age movie theaters, a domed armada set sail across a landscape in which anything suddenly seemed possible.

At the time of its opening 50 years ago in a fallowed farm field, "looking like a flying saucer about to take off," Century 21 became the first theater in Northern California that challenged the imagination of moviegoers as much as the pictures that played there.

Now it's among the last of its kind standing. After a recent, dramatic showdown at City Hall, the cinematic spaceship that architect Vincent Raney designed for a "city obsessed with the future" looks likely to be saved because of its past. But a broader debate continues over just which parts of the Bay Area's history are truly historic: Raney's domes in Fremont and Oakland are already gone, and his Pleasant Hill theater gave way to the wrecking ball last year after a City Council vote, despite a last-minute campaign by preservationists to save it.

Raney built a dozen domes in the Bay Area, all for movie impresario Ray Syufy. The theater impresario agreed to locate San Jose's Century 21, 22 and 23 -- the original theater's round-roofed companions -- on 11.6 acres owned by the architect's family, which also controlled the adjacent Winchester Mystery House, the peaks and cupolas of its rooftop in stark counterpoint to the nearby dome star fleet.

"As this area grew and changed from agriculture to technology, these domes became an important emblem of that change," said Matthew Sutton, standing forlornly outside the now-closed Century 21, which opened in 1964 and closed on March 31. "They wanted to evoke the future and embrace the optimism of the Space Age, that postwar Camelot era." Sutton organized a Save the Domes Facebook page, which, along with a petition drive that drew more than 8,600 signatures on Change.org, was thought to have influenced the City Council's 7-4 vote on June 10 to grant landmark protection to Century 21.

Last year, a campaign to save the CinArts, Raney's dome in Pleasant Hill, fell one vote short when it went before City Council. During that debate, one woman warned council members that "once it's destroyed, like the Twin Towers, you don't see it anymore." In San Jose, an impassioned dome defender cautioned the council against committing "dome-icide."

Floating objects

For now, Century 21 has been spared that fate, but Century 22 and 23 appear unlikely to survive long enough to justify their names. Century 22 opened in 1966 as a single dome, followed a year later by Century 23. But as multiplexes began to replace single-screen theaters in the 1970s, Century 22 expanded to a Picasso-esque embarrassment of riches with three domes, each one with its own screen.

Unlike buildings that create a wall along the street, these were "object buildings," said architect Sally Zarnowitz, a former member of San Jose's planning department, "that lend themselves to floating in the landscape."

Century 21 was clearly the mother ship, with its unmistakable resemblance to the flying saucer that brought Klaatu and Gort to this planet in the 1951 sci-fi classic "The Day the Earth Stood Still." Raney gave it a gaudy zigzag parapet that also evoked a merry-go-round, Zarnowitz said. "All of that played into the idea of leisure architecture in the '60s."

Follow this link:
Bay Area dome theaters face extinction

SAN JOSE -- They were the Nia, the Pinta and the Santa Maria of Space Age movie theaters, a domed armada set sail across a landscape in which anything suddenly seemed possible.

At the time of its opening 50 years ago in a fallowed farm field, "looking like a flying saucer about to take off," Century 21 became the first theater in Northern California that challenged the imagination of moviegoers as much as the pictures that played there.

Now it's among the last of its kind standing. After a recent, dramatic showdown at City Hall, the cinematic spaceship that architect Vincent Raney designed for a "city obsessed with the future" looks likely to be saved because of its past. But a broader debate continues over just which parts of the Bay Area's history are truly historic: Raney's domes in Fremont and Oakland are already gone, and his Pleasant Hill theater gave way to the wrecking ball last year after a City Council vote, despite a last-minute campaign by preservationists to save it.

Raney built a dozen domes in the Bay Area, all for movie impresario Ray Syufy. The theater impresario agreed to locate San Jose's Century 21, 22 and 23 -- the original theater's round-roofed companions -- on 11.6 acres owned by the architect's family, which also controlled the adjacent Winchester Mystery House, the peaks and cupolas of its rooftop in stark counterpoint to the nearby dome star fleet.

"As this area grew and changed from agriculture to technology, these domes became an important emblem of that change," said Matthew Sutton, standing forlornly outside the now-closed Century 21, which opened in 1964 and closed on March 31. "They wanted to evoke the future and embrace the optimism of the Space Age, that postwar Camelot era." Sutton organized a Save the Domes Facebook page, which, along with a petition drive that drew more than 8,600 signatures on Change.org, was thought to have influenced the City Council's 7-4 vote on June 10 to grant landmark protection to Century 21.

Last year, a campaign to save the CinArts, Raney's dome in Pleasant Hill, fell one vote short when it went before City Council. During that debate, one woman warned council members that "once it's destroyed, like the Twin Towers, you don't see it anymore." In San Jose, an impassioned dome defender cautioned the council against committing "dome-icide."

Floating objects

For now, Century 21 has been spared that fate, but Century 22 and 23 appear unlikely to survive long enough to justify their names. Century 22 opened in 1966 as a single dome, followed a year later by Century 23. But as multiplexes began to replace single-screen theaters in the 1970s, Century 22 expanded to a Picasso-esque embarrassment of riches with three domes, each one with its own screen.

Unlike buildings that create a wall along the street, these were "object buildings," said architect Sally Zarnowitz, a former member of San Jose's planning department, "that lend themselves to floating in the landscape."

Century 21 was clearly the mother ship, with its unmistakable resemblance to the flying saucer that brought Klaatu and Gort to this planet in the 1951 sci-fi classic "The Day the Earth Stood Still." Raney gave it a gaudy zigzag parapet that also evoked a merry-go-round, Zarnowitz said. "All of that played into the idea of leisure architecture in the '60s."

See original here:
San Jose's Century 21 theater: No place like dome

In 1600, what was to become Connecticut was essentially nothing but trees.

"If it isn't a rock outcrop, and it isn't a wetland or water body, and it isn't a bald patch on a coastal dune, it is all forest," said Robert M. Thorson, a University of Connecticut professor of geology who has researched changes in landscapes extensively.

Not only was the landscape dominated by trees, they were big, mostly mature trees, said David R. Foster, director of Harvard University's Harvard Forest in Petersham, Mass., and an authority on New England forest history.

The Connecticut forest 400 years ago was a rich mix of species, often park-like, without much brush in the understory. In places, native Americans burned patches of forest to keep them open, but much of the state was simply mature, pristine forest.

Native Americans grew crops, but their numbers were comparatively small and their impact on the woodlands was thought to be slight, though there are differences of opinion today among researchers on how just how much the Indians altered the landscape.

Once European settlers arrived, in the first decades of the 17th century, landscape changes became far more dramatic, as early settlers cleared land for their farms. Still, at first, that clearing was largely confined to parts of the Connecticut River valley and the coast, old towns like Windsor, Hartford, Wethersfield, Old Saybrook and Guilford. The rest of the state was woods.

For example, as late as 1700 the hilly countryside that would become New Hartford was forest, river and lake, said William Hosley of Enfield, a cultural resource and marketing and development consultant who has studied Connecticut history for 34 years. There may have been native American trails in the area, but any other sign of human presence was unlikely, he said.

In 1714, with Connecticut still a colony, Henry Woodward moved from Lebanon to Columbia, buying the hill beside an area known as the Great Meadow, creating a farm whose history roughly parallels many of the changes in the Connecticut landscape over the centuries. By 1830, that hill was known as Woodward Hill.

"One of the first things he did was build a dam on the stream exiting the meadow, build a sawmill, and begin the process of deforestation that is such a part of the New England story," said Walter W. Woodward, a professor of history at UConn, the official Connecticut state historian, and a descendant of Henry Woodward.

The Woodward dam and sawmill was but one of many small-scale dams and mills erected mostly on smaller streams. The remains of some of them still can be found along rivers.

Read the original:
When Forests Covered The Connecticut Landscape

South Mumbai is well-known for its plush corporate offices, charming heritage structures, the dazzling Queen's Necklace, cultural and festive attractions, vibrant places of worship and other well-planned localities. But an overlooked feature of SoBO are the still-surviving pockets of greenery in an otherwise highly urbanised landscape.

Actually, what remains is but a minuscule part of the once verdant labyrinth of orchards, dense mangroves and lush moist deciduous forests on hill slopes. The early Portuguese described the city as "laden with fruits, flowers and dense tropical vegetation". Articles from the British era depicted in the Bombay Natural History Society's (BNHS) coffee table book, Living Jewels From The Indian Jungle talk about tigers coming from Malabar Hill to drink water at Gowalia Tank. It is said that when the pioneer of Bollywood, Dadasaheb Phalke, decided to shift to a house in Dadar, neighbours advised him against, calling it a "far-off jungle"!

Nevertheless, what remains is precious and worth visiting. The dense, green vegetation on Malabar Hill includes the canopy in Hanging Gardens, the slopes behind Babulnath Temple, the Tower Of Silence, and the sprawling acres of Raj Bhavan. This natural-cum-man-made forest includes gulmohar, desi badam, copperpod, mango, coconut, rain tree, jamun and jackfruit. It houses dozens of species of birds, including rose-ringed parakeet, coppersmith barbet, magpie-robin, golden oriole, peafowl and even a typical forest bird like brown-headed barbet. Mongoose and various snake species have been spotted.

Horniman Circle, nestled amongst heritage structures such as the Asiatic Library and Bombay House, is another soothing patch of emerald. A huge banyan tree along with coconut trees is conspicuous among our other green friends here. Close by, the premises of Chhatrapati Shivaji Museum (formerly Prince of Wales Museum) shelters beautiful specimens of baobab, ratangunj, mango, Chinese fishtail palm and jackfruit. The space in front of BNHS Hornbill House is decked with mahua, tabebuia and kadamb. Both flanks of the Oval Maidan have majestic specimens of wild almond, karanj and bottle palm. The Western Railway headquarter's premises has an elegant cannonball tree while the footpath in front of HPCL Petroleum House dons a purple hue with taman flowers in late summer.

The tree diversity in Sagar Upvan (Colaba), the shaded naval area further south, the green premises of some clubs near the Race Course, the dense mangroves along the 10kms Sewri-Mahul coast that support the flamingos, the lush tree cover on the Sion Fort hill, the mini forest in Maharashtra Nature Park (Dharavi) and the unique botanical heritage of Jijamata Udyan (Rani Baug) are some of the other green spaces that continue to grace the landscape of South Mumbai.

The writer is the Manager-Communications at Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS)

Read this article:
South Mumbai's green heritage

SAN JOSE -- They were the Nia, the Pinta and the Santa Maria of Space Age movie theaters, a domed armada set sail across a landscape in which anything suddenly seemed possible.

At the time of its opening 50 years ago in a fallowed farm field, "looking like a flying saucer about to take off," Century 21 became the first theater in Northern California that challenged the imagination of moviegoers as much as the pictures that played there.

Now it's among the last of its kind standing. After a recent, dramatic showdown at City Hall, the cinematic spaceship that architect Vincent Raney designed for a "city obsessed with the future" looks likely to be saved because of its past. But a broader debate continues over just which parts of the Bay Area's history are truly historic: Raney's domes in Fremont and Oakland are already gone, and his Pleasant Hill theater gave way to the wrecking ball last year after a City Council vote, despite a last-minute campaign by preservationists to save it.

Raney built a dozen domes in the Bay Area, all for movie impresario Ray Syufy. The theater impresario agreed to locate San Jose's Century 21, 22 and 23 -- the original theater's round-roofed companions -- on 11.6 acres owned by the architect's family, which also controlled the adjacent Winchester Mystery House, the peaks and cupolas of its rooftop in stark counterpoint to the nearby dome star fleet.

"As this area grew and changed from agriculture to technology, these domes became an important emblem of that change," said Matthew Sutton, standing forlornly outside the now-closed Century 21, which opened in 1964 and closed on March 31. "They wanted to evoke the future and embrace the optimism of the Space Age, that postwar Camelot era." Sutton organized a Save the Domes Facebook page, which, along with a petition drive that drew more than 8,600 signatures on Change.org, was thought to have influenced the City Council's 7-4 vote on June 10 to grant landmark protection to Century 21.

Last year, a campaign to save the CinArts, Raney's dome in Pleasant Hill, fell one vote short when it went before City Council. During that debate, one woman warned council members that "once it's destroyed, like the Twin Towers, you don't see it anymore." In San Jose, an impassioned dome defender cautioned the council against committing "dome-icide."

Floating objects

For now, Century 21 has been spared that fate, but Century 22 and 23 appear unlikely to survive long enough to justify their names. Century 22 opened in 1966 as a single dome, followed a year later by Century 23. But as multiplexes began to replace single-screen theaters in the 1970s, Century 22 expanded to a Picasso-esque embarrassment of riches with three domes, each one with its own screen.

Unlike buildings that create a wall along the street, these were "object buildings," said architect Sally Zarnowitz, a former member of San Jose's planning department, "that lend themselves to floating in the landscape."

Century 21 was clearly the mother ship, with its unmistakable resemblance to the flying saucer that brought Klaatu and Gort to this planet in the 1951 sci-fi classic "The Day the Earth Stood Still." Raney gave it a gaudy zigzag parapet that also evoked a merry-go-round, Zarnowitz said. "All of that played into the idea of leisure architecture in the '60s."

Read the original:
Bay Area domes face extinction

A controversial winery project in Yountville won narrow approval from county planners on Wednesday after a contentious public hearing and some public wavering by a key planning commission member.

The hearing on the 100,000-gallon winery project proposed to be built on Yountville Hill unfolded much like a heavyweight boxing match proponents trading arguments with the developers, but neither side scoring a decisive knockout.

That initially left the commissioners split at the end of a marathon five-hour meeting before an overflow crowd, with Commissioners Matt Pope and Terry Scott saying they opposed the project because its production was too great and its marketing plan too aggressive for a 10.9-acre parcel off of Highway 29 and south of Yount Mill Road.

Commissioners Bob Fiddaman and Mike Basayne said they were in favor, and Commissioner Heather Phillips recused herself due to a conflict of interest, leaving a two-two deadlock and spelling defeat for the winery. Before the commission could vote formally, however, Eric Sklar, developer of the proposed Yountville Hill Winery, asked for a two-week delay to possibly revise the project and win over votes.

After a brief recess to discuss the delay, the commissioners returned and Pope said he would change his vote. By a 3-1 margin, with Scott opposed, the commission voted to approve the projects use permit to the stunned silence of the roughly 50 people left in attendance, almost all of them opposing the winery.

Pope prefaced his initial comments opposing Yountville Hill by saying he was deeply torn about the project, believing some of the vintners who wrote letters opposing it were saying I got mine, now too bad for you. He also believed that by making it difficult and prohibitively expensive for winery developers, the county was narrowing the pool of new winery owners to large corporations with the deep pockets to navigate the process.

Still, he said he was swayed by the arguments that Yountville Hill could be a precedent-setting decision for Napa Valley, in essence giving a green light for developers to pursue large-production projects that need ample tasting room traffic, nestled into narrow parcels in the hillsides.

Pope said comments from commission Chairman Bob Fiddaman ultimately changed his mind, as Fiddaman argued that the commissioners were bound by the countys existing interpretations of the laws and therefore had to approve the winery.

This was the most ambivalent Ive ever been, Pope said shortly before changing his vote. I am in support of this project and that is my decision.

Lester Hardy, an attorney working with Sklar on the project, said after the hearing that Pope changing his vote reflected him keeping an open mind about Yountville Hill, and shows that the hearing process with each side exchanging arguments and evidence ultimately works.

See the article here:
Yountville Hill winery wins narrow approval from planners