Three ocean-going research and survey vessels will be plying Rhode Island’s coastal waters this month to collect data for the unprecedented ocean-mapping effort that is paving the way for the proposed $1.5-billion wind turbine farm that Governor Carcieri wants to develop south of Block Island.

The vessels are the 224-foot Bold operated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the 208-foot Thomas Jefferson operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the 185-foot Endeavor operated by the University of Rhode Island.

The first two vessels are already at work, and the Endeavor is scheduled for two five-day cruises later this month, according to Grover Fugate, executive director of the Coastal Resources Management Council.

The CRMC is halfway into a two-year effort to survey and map the state’s coastal waters so it can determine the best place to locate the wind farm.

The state administration has selected Deepwater Wind of New Jersey to develop the wind farm. Deepwater’s current plans call for erecting five to eight turbines in state waters south of Block Island to produce energy for the island. Later, it plans to erect far more turbines in federal waters farther south of Block Island to generate electricity for the rest of the state.

A special CRMC subcommittee that is supervising the ocean mapping project met Thursday afternoon at the URI’s Narragansett Bay Campus to discuss the agency’s rule-making process for siting the turbines.

One committee member, Paul Lemont, said he is concerned that the public and many news organizations don’t understand the CRMC’s role in developing the wind farm.

The Ocean Special Area Management Plan is being developed by the CRMC, with Fugate in charge, operating on a separate track from the administration’s dealings with Deepwater. It is similar in many ways to plans the CRMC has created for the coastal ponds, Greenwich Bay, Aquidneck Island and the Metro region.

But this one is far bigger in many ways. It covers 1,547 square miles of coastal water. The state is spending $4 million, largely on URI researchers, to collect data. (Deepwater has agreed to reimburse those costs later.) And meetings have been held for the last year with the public and other stakeholders to get their views.

On Thursday, CRMC lawyer Brian Goldman presented a draft plan for turning all that data into rules that will lead to siting the turbines.

Basically, the data will be presented in a series of chapters on such topics as fishing, recreation and tourism, ecology, marine transportation and others. The chapters will describe important resources that need protection and help point to areas in the ocean where the turbines would cause the least harm or disruptions. As each chapter is completed, it will be posted on the CRMC-Sea Grant Web site and reviewed at public stakeholder meetings. Comments would be integrated into the chapters.

The study team will present each chapter to the CRMC subcommittee, which will hold a public hearing. Then the chapters would be sent to the full council for a review. There would be a 30-day or longer period for public comment. The CRMC would then review and respond to comments, hold another hearing, and then have a final vote.

Goldman said he expected early chapters to be noncontroversial, and the CRMC could consider several at a time.

The final chapters that assess all the earlier work and set policies and governance would probably take more effort to review, Goldman said.

CRMC Chairman Michael Tikoian said that there will be four separate opportunities for public comment during the work on each chapter. He said he favored the frequent hearings because the project is so “important to the people of Rhode Island.”

The CRMC plans to display a chart outlining its rule-making process on its Web site, and give the public until Oct. 3 to comment.

Meanwhile, Fugate said the federal Minerals Management Agency, which is authorized to regulate wind turbines in federal waters, has created a task force for the Rhode Island project and will meet soon with local officials.

Fugate said he hoped to make the case of consistency with federal officials so that policies enacted for state waters could be extended to federal waters to regulate the turbines.

Tricia Jedele of the Conservation Law Foundation said it will be difficult to offer detailed comments on what will amount to a moving target because chapters will be offered one at a time and subject to change as more data comes in.

Fugate did not disagree. “What we’re really gearing up for has to be an adaptive management process. This has never been done before.”

Tikoian said he expects the work to be completed by August 2010.

For more information on the ocean-mapping process, go to:
http://seagrant.gso.uri.edu/oceansamp/index.html

plord@projo.com