A new ocean management plan being prepared for the state leaves waters on three sides of the Vineyard wide open for development, raising the prospect of large-scale commercial wind generation as close as one mile off shore, the head of the Martha’s Vineyard Commission said yesterday.

MVC executive director Mark London said maps which formed part of a presentation made by state officials at a workshop in Woods Hole last weekend showed waters to the east, south and west of the Island open to unregulated development.

“Theoretically, they could have a continuous belt of wind turbines . . . most of the way around the Island,” Mr. London said.

While he acknowledged he was describing an extreme situation, the fact is that the provisions of the new Oceans Act — details of which are still being finalized — threaten to have major impacts on the Vineyard.

Mr. London was preparing a letter, to be discussed at last night’s meeting of the commission, drawing attention to some of the perceived inadequacies and unaddressed issues in the state’s draft management plan.

“I am not sure whether the people of Martha’s Vineyard and the boards of selectmen have quite understood what’s happening with the Oceans Act,” he said. He continued:

“Up to now, the ocean has been a sanctuary and for all intents and purposes there was little or no development allowed in state waters, out to the three-mile limit.

“But with the adoption of the Oceans Act, that sanctuary status will be lifted and development of a variety of things will be allowed, for example wind turbines, sand and gravel [dredging], mining and aquaculture.”

Last Saturday’s presentation by staff of the relevant state agency, the executive office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, Mr. London said, provided the first glimpse of how that development regime — a draft management plan scheduled to come before the state legislature at the end of June — was being mapped out.

Broadly, use of the coastal seas would be divided into three categories: exclusionary zones, which would remain protected; constraint zones, where certain activities would be allowed, and; what Mr. London described as “no constraints, no problems, go right ahead.

“Most of the waters around Martha’s Vineyard are in that third category, wide open for development.

“It may well change by the end of June, but based on what we saw on Saturday, pretty well the whole west, south and east — although not the north shore — of Martha’s Vineyard was available for development.”

Mr. London said he was alarmed and dissatisfied, not only with the ocean zoning, but also with the answers provided at the briefing on a number of related issues.

He complained that while the state talks about “appropriate” scale development, it was not defined.

And among the values the management plan considers, scenic values are not featured.

“Martha’s Vineyard has a visitor-based economy — $18 billion worth of real estate, $800 million of gross domestic product each year, all visitor based, and reliant on scenic values,” Mr. London said.

“I asked how they were going to incorporate that and they said they didn’t know how to do it, so they weren’t going to,” he said.

“On that basis, I told them if they were going to consider two possible locations for, say, 50 turbines, 500 feet high, and one possible location is south of Noman’s Land and another is one mile off South Beach, those projects would be equally acceptable.

“They said they would look into it.”

Other concerns Mr. London enumerated included what is termed local preference, a means by which locally supported, community development of resource projects would take precedence over large-scale commercial ones.

He cited the prospect, contemplated in the MVC’s upcoming Island Plan, of an Islandwide energy cooperative which would site some 30 turbines in Island waters, generating enough power to make the Vineyard energy self-sufficient.

“People here feel there is a pretty big difference between us doing it and owning it and getting benefit of it, versus the commonwealth . . . giving it out to some private developer from somewhere else, sending the power somewhere else,” Mr. London said.

The state official, he said, indicated they were “thinking of thinking of having a category which would give preference to small local developments.”

Mr. London also restated a long-held concern of the commission and its off-Island sister body, the Cape Cod Commission, about a diminution of regulatory power.

The Oceans Act provides that the two local bodies would have regulatory authority over any development in the oceans. But language in the act allows appeals of commission decisions to go to the state Energy Facilities Siting Board, the same body which overrode the Cape Cod Commission on the Cape Wind project. Ordinarily appeals go to the superior court; the language in the Oceans Act effectively guts the commission’s unique powers.

“We just expressed interest in working out some partnership whereby we have local involvement early in the process and not at the last minute,” Mr. London said.

The Saturday workshop on the Oceans Act was not the only one to cause Mr. London concern last week. The previous day, Friday, state officials involved with the Green Communities Act attended a forum on-Island, which brought its own frustrations.

On its face, the Green Communities Act should be a boon to environmentally-concerned communities such as the Vineyard.

It provides that if towns meet certain criteria, such as buying energy efficient vehicles for their fleet and adopting stringent energy codes, they qualify as green communities and thereby qualify for certain grants.

The tricky bit from the Vineyard’s perspective is the requirement that each town must zone some of its land to allow for one of three kinds of activity — either the production of renewable energy, the establishment of renewable energy research and development, or the manufacture of renewable energy technology.

Development within these zones would be as of right.

“But take Oak Bluffs, for example,” said Mr. London. “It’s quite small, it doesn’t have a big industrial park, doesn’t have large areas of undeveloped land and it is close to an airport.

“It may well be that nowhere in Oak Bluffs is it feasible to do this. Or in Tisbury or West Tisbury.

“So if they apply this requirement on a town-by-town basis, it may well be that even if the town wanted to become a green community and was willing to do everything required, it still couldn’t fulfill that requirement in any reasonable way.”

A better alternative, he said, would be to take a regional approach.

Thus if the Island energy cooperative went ahead, for example, it would count toward winning green community status to all Island towns, no matter where the actual generation took place.

“Each town would have to do all the other stuff, like energy efficient vehicles and energy codes, but we would have a way of fulfilling that specific requirement for the siting of renewable energy facilities,” Mr. London said.

He said the Cape Cod Commission also favored the regional, rather than town-based approach.

“But so far the bureaucrats are saying that the wording of the act may not give them that flexibility.

“If they’re goal is to encourage alternative energy and energy efficiency, it seems to me they’re sort of shooting themselves in the foot,” Mr. London said.