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BURLINGTON — John Lesher likes to take his aging yellow lab on walks through the 40 acres of forest and wetlands that abut his Cumberland Road home in the New North End.

The property’s owner, Frank von Turkovich, long ago gave him permission for those walks, and Lesher said they have a “positive” relationship, “except on one point.” Lesher doesn’t want to see von Turkovich’s company, South Forty, LLC, build a 2.5 megawatt solar project with 10,800 panels on roughly 300 arrays covering close to half that land.

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Von Turkovich and members of his family have a long-term lease on the property from the Flynn Estate. Though its zoning allows for residential development, previous plans to build housing there have stalled because of neighbors’ opposition and environmental concerns — about half the land is protected wetlands. The solar farm is slated for the other half, except for a few pockets.

South Forty signed a power purchase agreement with the Burlington Electric Department last year. The 2.5 megawatts will generate enough electricity to power 740 average homes and will reduce the utility’s need to buy power from other sources during periods of peak demand, said BED General Manager Neale Lunderville.

The project, just off Sunset Cliff Road in city’s New North End, is now before the Public Service Board, which regulates solar development in the state. Two neighborhood associations are party to the proceeding, and a third is likely to join them. Neighbors are concerned the panels will be an eyesore and increase stormwater runoff.

Brian Dunkiel, an attorney representing South Forty before the Public Service Board, said his client is aware of residents concerns and they’ll be taken into consideration going forward.

Regulators and developers will visit the site next Nov. 19, and that evening, at 7 p.m., there will be a public hearing on the project held at the Robert Miller Community and Recreation Center on Gosse Court.

Last year, Burlington’s Board of Conservation provided the City Council with a list of concerns about the project, which the council voted to pass along to the Public Service Board. Those concerns centered around the project’s potential impact on wetlands and stormwater runoff.

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In a memo presented to the City Council earlier this week, Assistant City Attorney Kimberlee Sturtevant told councilors that “to our knowledge not all of the Conservation Board’s concerns have been addressed.”

Sturtevant says in the memo that it would be “helpful” to know if the council plans to take a position on the project prior to November 19. At Monday’s council meeting, her memo was entered into the record without the councilors taking a position on the project.

Lesher has already discovered another issue with the project, which he recently brought to city officials. The post-mounted panels would be installed directly on top of a city sewer line. In a November 4 email, Steve Roy, a water resources engineer with the Department of Public Works, said that constructing solar panels over the sewer pipe is “completely unacceptable.”

Lesher said the pipe serves several Appletree Bay condominiums where during periods of heavy rainfall, sewage has backed up into homes. If there isn’t an access road or some other way for DPW to reach the sewer pipe as it crosses the property, residents could be in trouble, he said.

Roy said in his email that the city will advise South Forty of the problem. Dunkiel, the South Forty attorney, said his client is looking into solutions.

If he and other neighbors who oppose the project can’t block its arrival, they would at least like to see its scope reduced, Lesher said. His opposition is based in “NIMBY-ism,” he acknowledged, but he also believes that clearing trees, as the project would require, to build renewable energy is a dubious proposition for the environment.

The renewable power generation has to be weighed against the lost carbon sequestration and the environmental impacts of building and installing solar panels, Lesher said.

Von Turkovich is “on a clock to get this done, and I’m on a clock to delay him,” Lesher said. That clock is a deadline for federal solar tax credits that allow developers to write off 30 percent of solar construction costs. For projects that aren’t completed prior to December 31, 2016, the credits will be reduced by 10 percent.

Lesher said he hopes that if neighbors can delay the project beyond that deadline, then the economics will not make sense for South Forty to move forward.

“Having the project built so that it can take full advantage of all the financial incentives that are available to it is important,” said Dunkiel.

But there are also state-based incentives for building solar. Vermont requires utilities to purchase solar energy from commercial scale projects at 11 cents per kilowatt-hour versus the 4 to 8 cents they would pay for hydroelectric power.

The state has also set a special formula for the assessed value of nonresidential solar arrays. Property owners pay $4 per kilowatt directly to the state’s tax department, which deposits the money into the Education Fund.

That translates into $8,000 in property taxes for a 2-megawatt farm sitting on about 15 acres of land. South Forty is looking at 2.5 megawatts on 19 acres of land.

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