17 Years. Almost all of which was permitting and licenses. Construction took 11 months.
Meanwhile, when China needed to buy greater volumes of natural gas, they set up a purchase agreement to buy it from Turkmenistan and completed a 2900km pipeline project start to finish in just 22 months.
Obviously, we don't want to ignore civil rights, but it really is absurd that to build anything in this country requires you to retain half the state bar association for the inevitable endless NIMBY lawsuits.
Same for urban housing projects and "community benefit organizations" aka neighborhood shakedown outfits.
Which union? IBEW (electrical, wireman not linesman) has solar project labor almost completely locked down, electricians assemble the racking and panels, run all the conduit, pull all the wire, and terminate everything. Site work/concrete/buildings are the only work that falls outside the IBEW scope.
Edit: My employer does 8 figures worth of solar panel projects with union labor a year
Second edit: So CURE is a coalition of labor unions that sue to hold up solar projects while they try and force the developer to hire union labor. That’s pretty shady, there’s plenty of work to go around for everyone, no need to do shakedowns to get contracts IMO. There’s plenty of facilities that only hire union MEP contractors because the job will get done correctly, nearly all Class A office space, for example.
Typical example is this letter sent by lawyers on behalf of labor unions, commenting on the EIR of a solar project.
https://phonyuniontreehuggers.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01...
1. It would add noise to otherwise comatose street 2. It would serve as a gathering ground for kids
Both are true complaints ( and to an extent I would even say valid ).
What happened was what seems to happen in similar cases. They were assured, the library would only remain so big, but those promises were quickly abandoned in ways not dissimilar to the way US handled Indian treaties.
But I take your point, kids attracted to a library tend to be less likely to cause trouble. Frankly, any non-idle hands activity is better than nothing.
And I would add my own anecdote. The state decided to build a new office building by "selling" the land to a developer, who built the new building, that the state now leases. Also, the state passed a special law exempting this site from city zoning restrictions. The developer took out the parking lot and put up a multi level garage, for which they charge the office workers an annual fee. So the workers fanned out and park their cars along the streets in the surrounding neighborhoods, leading to congested streets and more traffic. The residents petitioned for "no parking" and "2 hour parking" signs along the streets in front of their houses. So now there's a 2-hour parking sign in front of my house, which I didn't ask for.
My point is that an innocent measure to enrich a developer had a spillover effect into the entire neighborhood. And there's still a bunch of undeveloped land on the lot, which the developer will be free to do with whatever they want. This kind of stuff fuels NIMBYism and the need for precise specifications hashed out in painful detail.
But that library has to go somewhere. It has to be in somebody's backyard. Just not MY backyard.
Trust is everything.
For the record, I think library is a good thing, net-wise. I understand their line of reasoning though.
Not to search very far, in Colorado neighbors sued for lowered property values due to marijuana smell from dispensary.
For better or worse, US property values do make a powerful argument for people to take their rights rather seriously.
I don't think "rights" extend that far. That's like saying if you buy stock in a company and then a competitor does something to drive the price down, that's violating your property rights.
It's a reasonable thing to discuss and bring up at a meeting, but it's not an issue of property rights.
The idea here being that there is an externality to your toxic waste dumping (both in terms of property values and the environmental/health consequences, potentially). You the dumper don't bear that cost, your neighbors do, even though the action is entirely your fault and, importantly, there's nothing your neighbors can do to prevent you from dumping the waste.
Property should be protected by law so that people are not deprived of it, but it does not follow that owning property gives you the right to be capricious.
In their case, I think they were referring to noise from cars ( people dropping off kids -- this is America after all ), gatherings and so on.