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Moratorium on late-hour
alcohol sales permit set
Roadside vending guidelines discussed
By Pearl Cantrell
Monitor Staff Writer
SEVEN POINTS–The Seven Points City Council placed a moratorium on
applications for late hour liquor service for 90 days during a special
meeting Monday.
Currently, two businesses are permitted to sell alcohol until 2 a.m. The
council would like to amend the ordinance to rollback the time to
midnight.
“That (allowing late hour sales of alcohol) has been nothing but
trouble,” councilman Hank Laywell said.
The bulk of the hour-long meeting was taken up with a discussion of
roadside vending.
The issue was tabled, so other city ordinances on the subject could be
reviewed and considered. In fact, the council tabled it not once but
twice, since discussion reopened on the subject.
The city ordinance, written Oct. 11, 1983, prohibits roadside vending in
the city of Seven Points and describes the temporary nature of such
operations out of cars, back of trucks and easily disassembled roadside
stands. It does not contain any parameters to clearly define roadside
vending.
“Is it vending within the easements or is it roadside vending if its on
private property off the road?” Mayor Gerald Taylor asked.
Councilman Bubba Powell advocated for protecting established businesses
in Seven Points from the encroachment such activities may have on them.
He was against roadside vending of any kind, anywhere.
“What about onetime sales, like when that man was selling stuff to raise
money for a cancer treatment? He had a set up at The Auction, which grew
into an every weekend thing,” Taylor said.
“Under a land-use permit, a person could sell from a temporary structure
or vehicle on a piece of private property,” but that’s a temporary
permit,” city secretary Debbie Mosley answered.
Councilman Tommy Taylor wanted to define roadside vending as any
operations that was not paying for utilities, such as water and
electricity.
“What if a private property owner has given permission for the activity
and says they can use an extension cord and a water hose?” Mayor Taylor
countered.
Laywell was all for guarding property owners rights to allow vending on
their business-zoned property, even if it wasn’t selling things that
their business license defines. “If it’s on private property, it’s not
roadside vending,” he said.
“I can see that we need to establish some guidelines,” councilman
Michael Lowe said and strongly suggested research into how other cities
deal with the subject.
Finally, the council directed the mayor to enforce the zoning ordinance
when it comes to discontinuance or abandonment of nonconforming use.
Grand jury indicts shooter
Monitor Staff Reports
KAUFMAN–The man who shot at what he believed were intruders crossing
his front yard was indicted by a Kaufman grand jury last week.
Rural Kaufman resident W.C. Frosch, 74, sparked a series of events the
night of March 1 when he shot Brandon Robinson, 15, from the window of
his house.
Frosch was charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.
The second-degree felony charge carries a sentence of up to 20 years in
prison and a $10,000 fine if convicted.
Robinson was not critically wounded. The bullet struck the young man
under his left arm.
Robinson was spending the night with Devin Nalls, 16, Frosch’s neighbor.
The two were crossing the yard to investigate some loud music from a
party in a home on the other side of Frosch’s house, the boys told
police.
Frosch said he felt justified in the action, because the boys were close
to his window.
Devin’s mom June Nalls, a nurse, was killed while taking the two boys to
the emergency room.
A vehicle driven by Agustin Renteria, 27, also of Kaufman, crossed the
center line and struck her pickup truck head-on.
Mrs. Nalls was killed. The two boys survived the crash.
Renteria was later arrested on a charge of failure to stop and render
aid, and a second charge of assault with a deadly weapon. His hearing is
set for 1:30 p.m. Thursday, June 19 in the 422 nd District Court.
Frosch will be tried in the 86th District Court.
Questions regarding whether Frosch’s actions would come under the
“castle doctrine,” passed by the state Legislature during its last
session, had been discussed.
However, law sponsor, Sen. Jeff Wentworth, R-San Antonio, said the law
was meant to be applied to situations of attack whether at home, work or
in one’s car.
Energy independence
Eustace retirees use wind power to cut
electric bills
By Kerry Yancey
Monitor Staff Writer
EUSTACE–People have been using the wind to turn millwheels or pump water
from the ground for centuries.
Using windmills to create electricity on a commercial scale has not
worked as well, due to the up-front costs and power transmission
difficulties involved, but new technology can enable rural homeowners to
use modern “wind turbines” to cut their power bills year-round.
“We have a totally different view of the wind now,” rural Eustace
resident Burton Love said Monday.
Back in February, Burton and Martel Love installed a modern “wind
turbine” at their new home, located just off Farm-to-Market 316 on
Eustace’s southwestern city limits.
There’s another very similar turbine in place off Peachtree Road and a
third going up nearby, Burton Love said.
Costs and noise once were serious drawbacks for wind-generated power,
but the Loves’ turbine is very quiet indeed – it’s inaudible inside the
house and not noticeably loud even when one is standing at the base of
the 50-foot tower.
“The wind speed has to be above a certain amount – 20 to 25 mph – before
you can even hear the blades,” Burton said. “It takes a wind speed of 8
mph for the turbine to generate electricity, and it will continue to
generate until the wind dies to less than 5 mph.”
“The early ones were noisy,” Martel said. “That was why they didn’t do
well in England, because they scared the cows. We’ve got cows all around
here, so we couldn’t be very noisy.
“We’ve been following (wind-generated power) for years, but they were
prohibitive, cost-wise,” she added. “When we first looked at them five
or six years ago, they were about $30,000.”
The Loves’ wind turbine cost right at $15,000 installed, which is
actually on the high end, partly due to their taller tower, Charles
Crumpley, president of Mesquite-based WeKnow Technologies, said Monday.
“We average about $12,500 to $13,000 on a 33-foot tower,” Crumpley said.
“His (the Loves’) installation was higher than most. It really depends
upon your site.”
The turbine itself, built by Southwest Wind Power in Flagstaff, Ariz.,
costs about $5,500, Burton Love said.
“One of the items you can’t tell about the cost (in advance) is the
wiring to the house,” Love added. “Wiring costs about $10/foot. That’s
the only unknown.”
Love said Crumpley’s firm was very cooperative and easy to work with, as
was Trinity Valley Electric Co-op (TVEC), which installed a digital
meter (at no cost) to monitor the Loves’ two-way transmission.
“They (WeKnow) did what they said they would do, and when they said they
would do it,” Love said. “Charles works with a number of electrical
contractors on installations.” Imperial Electric of Mesquite did the
Loves’ hookup.
“We are the largest volume dealer in the United States, installing two
to three turbines per day,” Crumpley said.
“Our installations are engineered top to bottom,” Crumpley added.
“They’re designed to handle 140 mph winds.”
The turbine’s carbon-fiber blades are designed to last 25 to 30 years,
and require only an annual visual inspection, which anyone can do,
Crumpley said.
A critical aspect is the tower’s foundation – the Loves’ tower is bolted
to a 5x5x5 cube of heavily reinforced concrete.
“If you open your car window and stick your hand out, you feel the wind
pressure,” Crumpley said. “Now, think of standing up in a pickup with a
4x8 sheet of plywood. It’ll blow you right over. You need a lot of
concrete to keep that in the ground.”
“You have to put the foundation in, and let it set at least 30 days
before you can put the tower up,” Martel said. “It would shake a dock to
pieces, so you can’t put it on a dock.”
“When they do the concrete base, they also do all the electrical
connections,” Burton said. “If there are any (city) codes, it has to
meet them.”
Once the foundation is ready, the tower can be erected and put into
service within a matter of hours.
When the wind is blowing, the Loves’ turbine generates a maximum of 2.7
kilowatts. That doesn’t sound like much, but it’s essentially free
electricity going back into the power grid.
“The only time we sell electricity back to TVEC is when we generate more
than what the house is drawing,” Burton Love said.
As a safety precaution, the turbine automatically shuts down in the
event of a power failure.
“If lightning strikes a transformer out here, TVEC will cut off power to
that section so crews can fix the problem,” Burton explained. “If the
turbine was still generating, it would mean the wire was still ‘live,’
and that would be hazardous.”
“It also shuts off if the wind gets too high,” Martel said.
Crumpley said the typical Skystream 3.7 turbine, like the Loves’,
generates between 400 and 750 kilowatt-hours per month, depending on the
site.
“We get a new cheerleader for the cause with every installation,”
Crumpley added. “People have been waiting for this.”
Crumpley said a site needs to be around a half-acre or more, with the
tower (a) at least 20 feet above any obstructions or (b) at least 250
feet away from obstructions.
It helps if you’re outside a city, or in a city without too many
restrictions on structure height, he said.
“If you’ve got an open field, you’re way ahead of the game,” he added.
Towers need to be able to tap the prevailing winds – north/northwest
during colder months and south/southwest in the summer – to be
practical, Crumpley said.
“If you’re by a lake, that changes everything,” he added.
WeKnow Technologies has a website at WeKnow.net, or e-mail windpower@weknow.net,
or call the Mesquite office at (214) 452-3710.
“At current prices, we know it (the turbine) will take quite a while to
pay itself off (maybe seven to 10 years),” Burton Love said, “but you
also have to understand that prices may not stay at the current level.”
The Loves, both federal retirees (he from the U.S. Food & Drug
Administration, she from the U.S. Treasury Department), are both
Metroplex natives, and both graduated from Dallas Sunset High School.
They moved to Cedar Creek Lake in 1996 to be closer to Martel’s mother,
former Gun Barrel City mayor Helen Broome.
Looking back, Burton Love said he couldn’t think of any drawbacks to
installing the wind turbine.
“The reason we did it was because our location might generate some
interest and encourage others to look into it,” Burton said. “You’re not
making quite as big of a carbon footprint.
“We’ve got the property, we’ve got the wind and we could (financially)
do it, so it was the right thing to do,” he added.
“My wife is actually ‘greener’ than I am,” he confided. “That’s our
third (Toyota) Prius in the garage.”
Monitor Photo/Kerry Yancey
Martel and Burton Love stand near an electricity-generating
wind turbine atop a 50-foot tower next to their rural Eustace home.
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