Apr 25 - Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News - Beth Daley The Boston Globe

For weeks, it has been unclear why an Alaska senator had introduced language into a Coast Guard funding bill that could kill a proposed wind farm off Cape Cod. But now, it appears that Senator Edward M. Kennedy is behind the amendment that would give Governor Mitt Romney veto power over the project.

Legislators in Washington could vote as early as this week on the funding bill.

Romney and Kennedy -- whose family compound would be within sight of the proposed wind-power facility in Nantucket Sound -- are strong opponents of the 130-turbine project.

A spokesman for Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska said yesterday that Kennedy had approached Stevens about inserting language in the bill to give Massachusetts a say over the project. But he said it was unclear who actually drafted the final language that is in the bill.

"But there is a little more to it than being approached by Senator Kennedy," said Aaron Saunders, the spokesman, confirming comments he had made in an interview with the Anchorage Daily News. "Senator Stevens sees it as a states' right issue. He believes the people of a particular state should be able to determine their destiny."

Kennedy has been reluctant to discuss his role in the amendment. A spokeswoman, Melissa Wagoner, said yesterday in an e-mail. "Senator Kennedy and Senator Stevens discussed the matter, including the need for the state to have a voice in the process."

But she added that members of a conference committee that seeks to resolve differences between the House and Senate versions of the Coast Guard bill had drafted the language, not Kennedy.

In an interview earlier this month, Kennedy said he saw Stevens at a funeral and told him he liked the provision giving the governor veto power over the project.

But when asked whether he had lobbied hard for the measure, Kennedy said at the time: "It's always in the eye of the beholder, the pushing."

Kennedy spoke to reporters briefly about Cape Wind yesterday, reiterating his belief that the state should have a voice in the siting of an offshore wind farm. Also yesterday, Romney said that if the full Congress passes the bill, he would issue a decision on the Cape Wind project before he leaves office early next year. He promised an "honest and full review."

A major lobbying effort on behalf of the wind farm has been launched by environmentalists to force a debate on the House and Senate floors to reject the bill and to send it back to committee to strike the language.

Greenpeace has begun running TV spots jabbing at Kennedy's attempts to quash the wind farm. The spots feature a giant cartoon caricature of Kennedy standing shin-deep in Nantucket Sound, trying, with a mallet, to hit windmills that pop out of the water. The ads are running in six states: New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Minnesota, New Mexico, and Nevada -- but not Massachusetts. They urge senators in those states to oppose the amendment language.

The chairman of the US Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Pete V. Domenici, a New Mexico Republican, and the committee's ranking Democrat, Jeff Bingaman, also of New Mexico, both have spoken out against the amendment.

But it is unclear whether opposition to the amendment would stop passage of the $8.7 billion Coast Guard authorization bill.

 

Scott Helman of the Globe staff contributed.