BY KEITH BENMAN, Times of Northwest Indiana
kbenman@nwitimes.com

House-size mounds of dirt litter the corn and soybean fields outside of Fowler, Ind., as if giant moles have tunneled there. (Video)

On the horizon five miles north, pointed white blades on 250-foot towers sweep around and around with a lazy, almost hypnotic motion.

As energy companies rush to build Indiana's first wind farms in Benton County, its rural landscape is undergoing the biggest change since pioneers settled there more than 150 years ago.

"There's the good, the bad and the great," said Lana Wallpe, whose family farms 2,000 acres in the county's center. "But the bad is temporary."

The bad is the huge bulldozers, dump trucks and cement mixers pounding farm roads to dust as work crews dig and pour foundations for 222 turbine towers that will make up the Fowler Ridge Wind Farm.

The good and the great consist of the annual payments of $5,000 to $9,000 farmers will receive for each wind turbine sited on their land.

"That's guaranteed money, come rain or hail or frost," Wallpe said.

Those payments will come from Fowler Ridge Wind Farm developers BP Alternative Energy and Dominion Resources.

Five miles north of the Wallpe farm, landowners already are collecting payments from Orion Energy, which operates a wind farm of 87 turbines at Earl Park.

Energy companies negotiated with county government and landowners for years before sealing the deals for the wind farms. But when the first wind turbines almost 350 feet in height from base to blade tip went up, no one was quite prepared.

"It was a shock all of a sudden to see them there, because everything is just so flat here," said Benton County Building Commissioner Sally Slavens.

Not everyone appreciates the newcomers.

"I don't like them," said Michael Schwartz, as he tuck pointed brick with his work crew at the Jennie Caldwell Memorial Home in Earl Park this week. "But the younger people, they'll grow up with them, so it won't make any difference to them."

"The same people who are gouging us for gas are making all the money off them," he added in reference to BP.

Another shock has been all the attention the wind farms have garnered the county of just 8,810 people.

On Thursday, around 200 farmers taking time off from planting sat under a football-field size white tent in a gravel construction lot just outside Fowler. They nervously checked watches and began to grumble when Gov. Mitch Daniels and BP America President Robert Malone were no-shows 20 minutes after the event's scheduled start.

When they arrived, they gave quick speeches, which were roundly applauded. The crowd roared approval for Daniel's optimistic prediction gasoline would someday fall below $4 a gallon because of projects like the wind farm and the BP Whiting refinery expansion.

Malone carefully steered away from any predictions on gasoline prices, joking he now spent more time at Congressional hearings than U.S. Rep. Pete Visclosky, D-Ind., a backer of both projects.

Malone promised to plow company profits, $35 billion in the last five years, back into projects like the wind farm and refinery.

"This is an example of the commitment that this country has to make and also that my company is making," said Malone, looking considerably more relaxed than he does when testifying before congressional committees.

In addition to the almost $4 million per year in income farmers countywide stand to gain from lease payments, the wind farms are resulting in big payments to Benton County government.

Benton County estimates it will reap $55 million during the next 20 years, according to County Council President Bruce Buchanan.

Building permit fees for the first 222 wind turbines at Fowler Ridge were $680,000. In addition, BP and Dominion will make four annual payments of $1 million to the county in exchange for a 10-year tax abatement. As the abatement winds down, the county stands to collect around $50 million in taxes in the next two decades.

"It's just such a huge project, none of us can comprehend it yet," Buchanan said. "But we will."

Buchanan favors doing away with the county's economic development tax and using wind farm income in its place. Others want to see property tax relief. Revamping the aging Benton County Fair Grounds also is high on the priority list for many residents.

The wind farm debate is just one of many going on in the county, as new ways of doing business have large corporations eyeing cooperative rural counties for other projects.

A plan to site a large landfill in Benton County to take garbage from Chicago and other states went down to defeat not long ago. The latest debate raging centers on proposals for giant hog farms known as confined feeding operations.

The passion swirling around those topics has made any disagreements on the wind farms seem gentle by comparison.

Under the white tent on Thursday, waiting for the governor and Malone, Jewel Gretencord said her family thought long and hard about how the tall white wind turbine towers would change life on the land.

There will be six Fowler Ridge Wind Farm wind turbines on Gretencord land.

"Some people jumped on the opportunity right away," she said. "We thought about it for awhile. Others didn't do anything, and now they wish they had."