Spanish Fork residents on Tuesday voiced divided opinions about a proposal to create the state's first wind farm in their city.

The $13 million proposal to install seven turbines, each 213 feet tall with wingspans of 252 feet, in an abandoned gravel pit one mile from the mouth of Spanish Fork Canyon is now being reviewed by the city's Planning Commission.

Two more turbines could be installed in a second phase. City Council members must still approve the project and a zoning change requested by the company.

Some of the 50 residents at Tuesday's meeting said they were enthusiastic for clean power; others didn't want to look at the towers and turbines; while still others said they wanted to be paid if someone was going to make money from the project.

One resident called the wind turbines "the ugliest and most ungodly thing you've ever seen. They are going to become uglier every day, so what I want to know is, what is Spanish Fork going to get out of it if we are going to bear all the burden of looking at these thingsfi"

"I would rather see wind farms than pollution," said another resident. "With windmills I can see the mountains. With haze from coal plants I can't see the mountains."

"You are going to plop this down on my front yard, and I want to know what we are going to get from doing that, rather than putting this is someone else's front yards," said another resident.

"We have an opportunity to harness the wind, and it is a clean way to make power, and if it is not going to affect my utility bill, I'm for it," said another resident.

Wind energy is big business in the rest of the country, said Tracy Livingston, CEO of Wasatch Wind, the company hoping to develop the wind farm.

Landowners who lease space to wind farm developers could be paid up to $4,000 per megawatt produced each year; the project would also pay about $100,000 in property taxes each year and more than $1 million in dividends to investors, which in turn would boost the local economy, he said.

If approved, the project would produce the equivalent of 74 percent of all the electric needs for Spanish Fork's 6,600 residential customers, he said.

The same amount of power produced by a coal plant would require 38 million pounds of coal and 40 million gallons of water annually and produce 160,000 pounds of nitrogen oxide pollution, 59,000 pounds of sulfur dioxide and 77 million pounds of carbon dioxide, he said.

Coal plants are also being sued for reducing visibility over national parks, he said. In the future they may be required to install new technology to reduce smog and haze, which would add to the price of the electricity they produce. Wind farms offer an alternative, he said.

"Spanish Fork has the best wind in the state," he said. "We've got enough wind coming out of Spanish Fork Canyon that we can make this happen without government support. We believe that this first project will create an awareness that is needed for other projects to get off the ground in this state, and I think that is the biggest, most important part of the project."

Christine Wilson Mikell, also of Wasatch Wind, said past turbines have been supported by lattice towers that were attractive roosts to birds but were moving so quickly the birds couldn't see the blades and were killed.

New towers, such as those that will be used in Spanish Fork, sit atop tubes not suited to roosting, and the blades move slowly enough to be seen by birds. Studies have shown that the new towers kill one bird of prey every 167 years on average, she said.

"Your cats kill more birds than a wind turbine would," she said.

The turbines will make about 50 decibels of noise, roughly the average amount of noise produced by cars on nearby U.S. 6 between 1 a.m. and 4 a.m.

"The reality is that you will never hear them because the wind will be blowing," she said.

Because wind coming from Spanish Fork Canyon is most active at night, the turbines would mostly turn at night, she said.

This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page D1.