Oct. 21--PROVIDENCE -- Save The Bay, the leading environmental organization in Rhode Island, is opposing a plan to erect a wind turbine at Black Point, a coastal property in Narragansett that was preserved two decades ago using state open-space bonds.

The Providence-based organization joined Tuesday with five other environmental advocacy groups -- all supporters of green energy -- to send a letter to Governor Carcieri that raises questions about the project. The plans being developed by the state Department of Environmental Management and the Town of Narragansett include the installation of up to six large wind turbines at various sites in the town.

The main focus of the environmentalists' concerns are the 42 acres at Black Point, a rocky strip on Rhode Island Sound the state purchased from Richard P. Baccari's Downing Corporation in 1989 to protect it from residential development. Save The Bay was a leader in the preservation fight.

Jonathan Stone, executive director of Save The Bay, said his organization is against any plan to put up a wind turbine at Black Point because, he contends, it would be an industrial use that would mar an otherwise pristine landscape.

"We'd be hard-pressed to argue anything but that," Stone said.

The letter to the governor does not go as far in its opposition, but it does question the propriety of a state agency pursuing renewable-energy projects on publicly owned, undeveloped land, and says the state lacks any policy or process to govern the issue.

"The need to establish reliable and self-sustaining renewable energy projects ... should not be viewed as a 'free pass' to wind-energy facility development on publicly owned lands. The state must consider whether it is appropriate to develop wind energy projects on publicly -owned lands in the first place," the letter says.

The letter was signed by Stone; Lawrence J.F. Taft, executive director of the Audubon Society of Rhode Island; Tricia K. Jedele, vice president and director of the Rhode Island advocacy center of the Conservation Law Foundation; Paul Beaudette, president of the Environment Council of Rhode Island; Rupert Friday, director of the Rhode Island Land Trust Council; and Janet Coit, state director of The Nature Conservancy's Rhode Island chapter.

Amy Kempe, the governor's spokeswoman, said that no decisions have been made on the project.

"That will go through a very comprehensive process if and when DEM chooses to move ahead with those locations," she said.