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Community Corner

Letter to the Editor: Board of Health Postpones Turbine Health Survey

Resident Mark Cool weighs in on the Board of Health's decision to delay a survey examining the health effects of wind turbines.

 

Falmouth's community health plan: Do you cost too much to protect?

Falmouth”s Board of Health decided Monday night to hold up the board’s survey examining the health effects of wind turbines.  This position is largely due to the board’s desire to ‘wait & see’ what decision Board of Selectmen may make tonight on the future of the town owned turbines.

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To wait for some hint to the direction Selectmen may choose isn’t unreasonable to me.  

What will be unreasonable however, given the overwhelming community outcry defining this problem primarily as a health problem, is whether the Board of Health will allow the 'Health Solution' to become the responsibility of some other local government body (i.e. Selectmen, Town Meeting or Voter).

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If the Board of Health treads toward abdicating their jurisdictional authority, I would contend that Falmouth’s Board of Health has lost it's ability to function in it's designed capacity.  The Falmouth Board of Health would effectively, not be necessary.  A community health problem, having any municipal fiscal implications associated, would become the proprietary responsibility of the Board of Selectmen, or more likely, Town Meeting since that local legislative body holds the town’s "purse strings."

The new era of protecting community health: cost analysis first - health diagnosis (if it don't cost much) after (maybe).  Reasonable?

Mark J. Cool, Falmouth MA

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