Mid-month March meetings

The much-anticipated meeting of the Jasper County Plan Commission was canceled for Monday evening. The newspaper notice of the agenda was published nine days prior to the meeting, not the required ten days. However notice for the Jasper County Board of Zoning Appeals was published in time, so that meeting did take place.

There was only one item on the BZA agenda, a variance for Von Excavating. This item had been discussed in the July, 2018 meeting and the Board had asked that the petitioner discover what the State required for highway access. It had taken the intervening time to get the property surveyed and permits from the State. The reason for a variance rather than a rezone was that there is no zoning that fit what the petitioner wanted to do, which is storage of materials for the business. There will be no retail sales from the lot and if in the future plans change to include retail sales, there will be need for additional approvals from the BZA. After a bit of discussion, the Board approved the variance. Then they wondered if the variance was attached to the land or to the applicant. They clarified that the variance was to the applicant, not the land.

The next meeting will be April 15.

The item that had drawn interest for the Plan Commission was an amendment to the wind ordinance. It contains a single change made in three different places: it replaces the 1760 foot setback with a 2400 foot setback for existing non-participating residences, for land zoned R1, R2, VR, M1, and M2, and for any platted residential subdivision. The current setback is .3333 miles and the proposed setback is .4545 miles. It will be interesting to see if anyone is happy with the change or if the comments at the next meeting will consist of complaints that the setbacks need to be larger so that the ordinance will effectively ban wind turbines (though it is not clear if they can be built with these setbacks).

On Tuesday evening the County Council met and the only interesting item on the agenda was tax abatement for Dunn's Bridge Solar LLC. At its previous meeting the Council had made parts of Kankakee Township an Economic Revitalization Area (ERA) and had been given some suggestions on a tax abatement for a proposed solar park. (See here for more information.) On Tuesday a representative for the solar company gave a few statistics to start the conversation. He noted that if the project is fully built, it will over 30 years provide about $35 million in payments to land owners and about $24 million in taxes. Further, the facility will require virtually no County services. For the past month Councilman Gary Fritz and JCEDO Director Stephen Eastridge have been working and negotiating with Orion Energy to develop an alternative tax abatement schedule to the those that the company had proposed in February. They eliminated the economic development payment, which reduced County revenue, and they shortened the abatement schedule from ten years to six. The abatement schedule for the six years will be 100%, 86%, 72%, 58%, 44%, and 30%. The company will get less abatement with this schedule and the County will get more in taxes, but perhaps because the County has low property taxes, the schedule is acceptable to the company. The proposal passed. Unlike most abatements, there are no employment goals in this one.

The rest of the meeting was occupied with the normal business of additional appropriations other items that are not of great public interest.

We had a couple of inches of snow on Sunday morning that was very pretty but thankfully it had almost all melted by sunset.

On Sunday the Fair Board had a chicken/pork-chop dinner and had fliers showing the entertainment schedule. It is different from what has been done in the past. There are no musical acts scheduled for the grandstand.