THE FORMER MAYOR OF AMARANTH, Bob Currie, is publicly critical of the current council's handling of township affairs, but as we see it, the council has acted properly in the public interest in reaching an agreement with Canadian Hydro Developers Inc. prior to the onset of what would otherwise have been a six-week Ontario Municipal Board hearing into 22 or 23 wind turbine sites.

Mr. Currie's criticism of the council is based in part on the lack of a realistic estimate of the legal costs of such a hearing, and his other complaint is based on the council's borrowing of $170,000 from development charges to limit the increase in tax rate this year to 5 per cent.

We'll not speak to the tax rise at this juncture, but we suspect that the council did not budget for a sixweek hearing as it knew all along that the hearing would not have to be that prolonged.

In fact, the current Amaranth mayor, Don MacIver, indicated as much in an interview during the pre-hearing conferences. And then, at the onset of mediation hearings, OMB Vice-Chairman Dan Granger intimated that the Board expects proponents and municipalities to resolve issues in accordance with the Provincial Policy Statement.

We would like to believe that the council continued in opposition to the wind farm in order to achieve as much for its residents as was possible while respecting the PPS. That would be a valid reason for expending taxpayer resources to the extent that it did, up to the point of the main event in what someone in the township referred to as "the turbine war."

That said, we would have preferred to have seen Melancthon council's approach adopted in Amaranth. There, the township council withdrew its opposition (if it ever truly existed) as soon as the Environmental Screening Report from Canadian Hydro was approved.

There were other dissenting parties, but the township left it to them to retain their own solicitors to reach an agreement on the process of the wind farm project. In the end, the hearing lasted hours, not days or weeks.

We commend both township councils for their decisions to avoid lengthy, costly and unnecessary hearings.