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URGENT: Don't Miss Tomorrow Night's Meeting

Friends & Neighbors, tomorrow night presents a great opportunity to make your voice heard. PLEASE take the time to attend this meeting (details listed below) and advocate for your own rights and interests as residents of our beloved community. Employees of EverPower are paid to represent the interests of Big Wind and continue to try to compare the proposed project in Champaign County to wind development taking place elsewhere, but the truth is, there is no project comparable to Champaign County when it comes to placing these 50-story industrial machines in residential areas. State "experts" are coming to discuss the wind farm in Van Wert County but that particular project is irrelevant to what is proposed for our county, as you can see from the statistics below. The four townships where the turbines are proposed in Champaign County have a MUCH greater concentration of residents (and significant population growth) than the parallel townships in Van Wert County.

Pro-wind advocates are bringing representatives from Van Wert County to Urbana University this coming Monday night at 7:15 pm to present the "benefits" of industrial wind development. We need all hands on deck for this event and if you can possibly make it please, please come. The old Champaign Advocates for Renewable Energy (CARE) has come back to life and they are encouraging pro-wind folks and leaseholders to attend. They are contacting school board members. As a reminder, of the three townships where their project is located, the following is reported by the US Bureau of the Census and as you can see, Van Wert County's project area is NOTHING like ours:

Van Wert County:

Township Population 2010 Population 2000 Percent Change from 2000 to 2010

Union 942 1,100 -6.6%

Tully 2,054 2,119 -3.1%

Hoaglin 662 605 9.4%

Champaign County:

Union 2,210 1,920 15.1%

Goshen 3,696 3,383 9.3%

Salem 2,539 2,307 10.1%

Wayne 1,809 1,660 9.0%

Not only do we have a significant and growing population, among our neighbors are the homes of numerous medical professionals and local employers. No one would choose to live in the middle of an industrial wind farm. If we lose even one of these valuable community resources, will Champaign County be able to replace them? Come and ask the speakers what they think!

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