Good afternoon, thank you for hearing me.
My name is Stephen Pascucci of Franklin, New Hampshire.
I want you to know, this issue was the number one determiner in how I voted in the past election.
I’ve had it with humans treating other humans as second rate citizens. I’m sure somewhere, there are people proud of how they’ve been able to manipulate the First Nations People, the political and judicial landscapes, and the citizens of New Hampshire. Such abject mistreatment of the First Nations People is an immediate deal breaker. Regardless of how much money is flowing into your pockets, no this isn’t the price of progress, no, we don’t “have to” do this. After all the creating fear about not modernizing and all the uproar about how badly we need jobs, no, we don’t have to break promises and destroy people’s homes and lives so that we “continue to progress”. This is just about a government corporation wanting a big payday.
This project does not modernize our electric grid. Rather, it brings electricity to and through our state across hundreds if not thousands of miles of powerlines, vulnerable to storms and other incidents, increasing our susceptibility to sustained power outages. Hydropower is an old-fashioned, backwards manner of generating electricity that is widely recognized to have many significant negative impacts on the environment. In this modern age where we are moving to protect more of our environment, we are removing dams, not creating them.
A truly modern power grid would focus on generating electricity from many smaller, more local power sources. As solar continues to decrease in cost, we and our New England neighbors will continue to shift to solar. It would behoove PSNH to get as early a start in that direction as possible. That is where our future lies.
This is a project that keeps us in the past, fueling conflicts with local government over issues of net metering and cost sharing. This is only going to get worse, and you know it. Fewer and fewer people are going to be shouldering higher and higher utility costs until this gets passed off as a giant weight on us taxpayers. That is unacceptable.
You want good jobs? Increase solar. Stop acting like it can’t be done. Stop acting like if we are against the powerline, we are against jobs. I’m against these jobs that steal land from the First Nation People and scar our environment. You all should be against these jobs. You can make other jobs, stop acting helpless.
I don’t want to someday look back and wonder what the heck happened, how did it get like this? I don’t want to someday be debating in NH how we’re going to pay for dismantling old and dangerous towers strangling our state with hundreds of miles of powerlines, useless long after your contracts have run dry. I don’t want to be part of yet another string of abuses handed out to those who are easy to take advantage of.
Every hurtful and damaging project becomes an excuse for the next hurtful and damaging and clearly unwanted, illegal project that uses the people and strips the land for the profit of the few. When are we going to have the integrity to say that we aren’t going to be a part of it, the buck stops here, no further? The weight of public opinion is clearly against this project. Any approval could only be taken as an open display of corruption within a government that should be hearing us and looking out for us.
There is a smarter, fairer, more effective way to do this.
We’re not supposed to be walking on the backs of others. We’re supposed to walk in consideration of others.