They came to the State House in Augusta from the townships and plantations of Concord, Lexington, Highland, Carrying Place and Pleasant Ridge.

As they left the five sparsely populated communities set between the Kennebec and Carrabassett rivers, dappled by lakes and cradled by the hills and mountains of western Maine, many of them passed a neatly lettered sign at the intersection of Long Falls Dam and Sandy Stream roads: “This is God’s Country. Don’t let wind towers come here and make it look like hell.”

There were two large wind power construction projects — Iberdrola Renewable’s Fletcher Mountain project and Independence Wind’s Highland Plantation project — proposed for mountains surrounding their communities.

Armed with the signatures of the majority of residents in their townships and plantations, they went to Augusta on March 28 to ask lawmakers to pass a bill giving them back the right to influence how land in their communities is used. That right, they said, had been taken away from them in 2008, when Maine adopted one of the nation’s most aggressive policies to promote wind power, putting them in the center of a fast-track wind development zone.

“We weren’t asked when they were put in,” said Karen Bessey Pease, a Lexington Township activist. “We have the mandate of the people in these communities to not be in it — and we’re hoping the Legislature will agree.”

Activists have staged dozens of attempts over the last five years to roll back provisions of the Wind Energy Act — almost all have been rejected.

This time, there were signs that the ironclad consensus in the State House about the virtues of wind power may be eroding.

Baldacci began it

The story begins five years ago, when Gov. John Baldacci, nearing the end of his second term and eager to make Maine a national leader in wind energy, instructed a task force to devise a regulatory scheme that would streamline wind project permitting.

Baldacci’s ambitions dovetailed with the expansion of the wind power industry, the climate change agenda of environmentalists, and the economic development agenda of lawmakers on his task force.

Task force members produced a report declaring “Maine can become a leader in wind power development, while protecting Maine’s quality of place and natural resources and delivering meaningful benefits to our economy, environment and Maine people.”

The report’s recommendations were soon turned into legislation to make building wind projects easier.

Swiftly, unanimously and with no debate, legislators passed the Wind Energy Act of 2008.

To supporters, the legislation was a triumph, establishing “one of the most robust wind-siting regimes in the nation,” said Eric Thumma, a representative of wind developer Iberdrola Renewables, a sister company to Maine’s Central Maine Power.

Before the law passed, three industrial-scale wind power projects already had been built in the state. Since then, seven have been approved; and five of them built. Six more projects are under review, according to state officials.

The Wind Energy Act set ambitious goals that could result in 1,000 to 2,000 turbines being constructed along hundreds of miles of Maine’s landscape.

The law eliminated legal obstacles that had long made wind development difficult:

— It weakened longstanding rules requiring wind turbines “to fit harmoniously into the landscape.”

— It cut off a layer of appeal for those opposing state permits for wind power.

— It opened every acre of the state’s 400 municipalities to fast-track wind development, as well as one-third of the state’s Unorganized Territory.

The law also knocked down one of the most significant obstacles to building wind towers in Maine’s rural areas known as the Unorganized Territory.

Under the old rules, a developer faced several steps to build wind turbines in the Unorganized Territory. The first big hurdle was to get a rezoning.

Rezoning included formal input from citizens in the surrounding areas and beyond, and could be a long and difficult process.

Some residents in rural and western Maine say the law took away their power to influence the future of their communities.

Before, a wind developer asking for rezoning “had certain criteria, certain hurdles that had to be met that, if you interpreted them with a straight face, you could never allow it,” said David Publicover, an Appalachian Mountain Club scientist who served on the task force.

So in order to promote wind power development, the new law made wind turbines a “permitted use” in the approximately one-third of the Unorganized Territory that was designated by the task force as an “expedited permitting area.”

“One of the things (the law) did in these locations was, in a single stroke, make grid-scale wind energy a form of industrial development that did not require specific and appropriate zoning,” Lexington Township’s Alan Michka testified before the Legislature. “Prior to this change, wind energy development required specific rezoning in all of the unorganized areas.”

Residents like Michka had believed the rural character protected by that zoning was an immutable fact of life.

“We invested in our properties confident in the fact that no large industrial development would ever happen in our communities without a public discussion and a chance to be heard,” Maine Guide David Corrigan, of Concord Township, testified.

How the boundaries of that expedited area were set will never be known — the task force’s deliberations on the area were confidential and they kept no minutes.

Norman Kalloch of Carrying Place Town Township isn’t in the expedited wind area, but neighboring Highland Plantation is.

“We, as residents of Carrying Place Town Township, can participate in our township’s future through public hearings regarding zoning changes required for any high-impact development, including grid-scale wind development,” Kalloch said during testimony on LD 616. “By contrast, if the same wind project is proposed on the other side of the township line in Highland, our friends and neighbors there would have no opportunity or means to participate that is comparable to ours.”

A second look

Almost three dozen rural residents came to the committee hearing on LD 616 and a number of other wind bills.

Sen. John Cleveland, DAuburn, the co-chairman of the committee, signaled that the committee’s near unanimous support for wind power might be changing.

“You’re talking to a brand new committee, folks who are committed to looking at your testimony, I don’t think we come precast in judgment,” Cleveland told them. “We’ll try to give you a fair hearing.”

The wind industry and its supporters were there, too.

Jeremy Payne, head of the Maine Renewable Energy Association, told the committee they should reject the bill because it “it specifically targets two known wind development project areas: Iberdrola Renewables’ Fletcher Mountain development and Independence Wind’s Highland Plantation development.

“The bill proposes to remove several townships and plantations from the Expedited Permitting Area, but, notably, offers no justification for doing so,” Payne said.

Those two wind developers, Payne said, invested “on the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars” in response to the Legislature’s “policy signal that these areas were designated as appropriate for wind project development.”

Ben Gilman, from the Maine State Chamber of Commerce, warned legislators that any changes would discourage investment by companies that had invested “more than $1 billion into the Maine economy” since the Wind Energy Act was passed in 2008.

“During our recent economic downturn, this has been an important part of the Maine economy,” Gilman said. “Part of the reason for this increased investment was due to the expedited permitting process put into place by the Legislature.”

Committee Co-Chairman Rep. Barry Hobbins, D-Saco, said he believes it is time to take a second look at the law.

“It’s a healthy idea for a committee of jurisdiction to re-evaluate and take a sounding of where we are and where we need to be in a future,” said Hobbins, who voted in favor of the Wind Energy Act in 2008.

He said the committee could take “a step back and look at the whole thing,” especially, he said, because he was disinclined to take five communities out of the expedited wind area without looking at how other communities felt.

“Instead of picking and choosing, that whole issue should be re-evaluated,” said Hobbins.

Lawmakers on the Energy and Utilities committee in the previous legislative session passed a bill requesting an assessment of the state’s progress in meeting the Wind Power Act’s goals, and directing legislation be crafted from the recommendations.

The bill requested that the study “shall also consider whether places should be removed from the expedited permitting area.” The assessment was delivered to legislators in 2012.

In a section on wind project siting, the authors wrote, “The governor, the Legislature, the Governor’s Energy Office, the Department of Environmental Protection and/or others should convene a panel to identify where in Maine expedited permitting would be allowed in a way that provides maximum energy, economic and environmental benefits and minimum harm to local residents and the environment.”

No action has been taken on the recommendations. The Energy and Utilities committee postponed the work session on LD 616, with no rescheduled date announced.

Former Rep. Wright Pinkham, a Republican who lives in Lexington Township, testified in favor of LD 616 and told lawmakers he regretted his 2008 vote to pass the Wind Energy Act.

“Sitting there talking with them, they absolutely agree what the ramifications are. Between shaking their heads, ‘I agree, I agree,’ and the lobbyists that are going to put huge pressure on them, I don’t know,” he said. “It depends on the pressure that’s put on them. And they are going to get a lot of pressure put on them.”

He had hope that lawmakers would see things his way.

“I don’t think anybody consciously voted to take away the rights of people in Lexington, Highland, Pleasant Ridge, Concord and all of the Unorganized Territory that’s in the expedited wind area,” he said. “They had not a clue, and that happens a lot of the time in the Legislature.”