BERLIN, N.H. (AP) – The city is rolling out the welcome mat for a Massachusetts developer hoping to gather a few megawatts from the breeze.

By the end of this year, Berlin will have four windmills on top of Jericho Mountain, making it the state’s only wind farm. If the development works out, there are plans to add up to 16 more.

In contrast to protracted fights against wind farms in places like Nantucket Sound, where celebrities and politicians have rallied against what they saw would run a perfect view, Berlin officials see the wind farm as a change to promote renewable energy and boost the city’s struggling tax base.

“We’re definitely not Cap Cod, that’s definite for sure,” said City Planner Pamela Laflamme. “These are not the same types of issues at all.”

Though wind farms tend to invite clashes pitting clean energy against concerns about animal habitats and bird migrations, Berlin officials haven’t demanded environmental tests.

Laflamme said the windmills are part of a new take-charge attitude in a city where the on-again-off again paper mill industry has led to economic despair.

Instead of remaining complacent with a manufacturing economy even as that economy crumbled, Laflamme jokes that the city has become a magnet for the “not-in-my-backyard” proposals that draw fierce debates in other towns.

“Just recently we’ve courted the federal prison, we’re very receptive to the possibility of an ATV park in our backyard, and now windmills,” she said. “To me, it’s progress, and progress sometimes involves odd things.”

Only one person – the mayor – spoke at a public hearing on the wind farm, and Laflamme said she received just one call from a resident who wanted to know whether he’d be able to see the turbines from his home. The answer was no.

Although the Berlin wind farm is being heralded as a great opportunity, proposals elsewhere in New Hampshire have had a less enthusiastic greeting. Unlike California or the Midwest, with its wide swaths of wind-swept plains, the only places in New England with enough wind are mountain ridges and offshore locations.

In Lempster, a Pennsylvania-based company has proposed putting 20 windmills on Lempster Mountain. Each would be 300 feet tall, twice the size of Berlin’s.

Jeff Dwyer, a retired real estate developer, is convinced the noise from the wind farm will make his property value plummet.

“It’s not a little hum,” he said. “It’s a constant roar, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.”

He hopes the town will call an emergency town meeting to enact zoning regulations to block the windmills and is working with a Lyman woman who fought successfully to prevent a wind farming company from setting up a test mill in her town.

Lisa Linowes and others collected signatures against the plan and organized opposition that eventually led to the company abandoning its plans.

Aside from ruining the view, she argues that wind isn’t a reliable source of energy.

“If Seabrook (nuclear power plant) goes down, you’d have to cover every ridgeline in the state of New Hampshire to produce that much electricity,” she said.