NIMBY rides again

On Monday evening the Jasper County BZA meeting attracted another standing-room-only crowd. The topic on the agenda was a special exception for the proposed Dunn's Bridge Solar Farm in Kankakee Township that Orion Renewable Energy Group LLC is planning. Orion brought at least six people to the meeting to make its case.

The project has been in the works for about three years. In 2018 I kept hearing rumors about it but it was not until December that the company appeared at a County meeting to discuss their plans. Since that time the County has put together a solar ordinance and granted the project a tax abatement. (See here, here, here, and here.) The Dunn's Bridge project will be approximately 2,500 acres but only 800 of those acres will have panels. Roughly 40 different families have made agreements with Orion for this project and most of them are local. The project is expected to generate about $25 million in tax revenues to Jasper County over its lifetime and about $35 million in revenues to landowners who are leasing land to Orion.

 The presentation began with a short summary about the company and the project. An item that I thought was interesting is that Orion will be building another wind farm close by, this one the 400 MW Jordan Creek project in Benton and Warren Counties.  The company then went through its findings of facts. (The BZA has a series of five items that it must vote on. It requests that the petitioner submit their rationale for why it meets the requirements of each item, such as whether the use is consistent with the comprehensive plan, is in harmony with adjacent land uses, etc.)

The project proposes planting native prairie plants between the rows of panels. They company argued that at the end of the project this use would result in better farm land because the land will have been idle for years. They also brought in a professional land assessor who did a study on the effects of solar farms on adjacent residential property values. He studied data from seven existing solar farms and could find no consistent effect on property values.

Then it was time for the the audience to comment. There were a variety of concerns raised but there were also a number of people, some who will lease land to Orion, who spoke in favor of the exception. Among concerns were noise from the motors that tilt the panels, effect on wildlife, danger of fires, leaching of toxic chemicals, the aesthetics ("I do not want to look at them—they are ugly"),  and worries about the safety of parts made in China. One speaker in favor was interrupted and heckled by another citizen despite the fact that the ground rules had made clear that there were to be no interruptions. The speaker got angry and started arguing with his heckler and both were escorted out by Court House security. That speaker apparently was renting land and he commented that he understood why the landowner wanted to lease to Orion, which would pay the landowner several times as much as what he paid as a renter. After the public had voiced its concerns, the Orion representatives were given a chance to respond to them.

Several people who lived in the area said that they had heard nothing about this project until a week or so ago. I found that both astounding and appalling and wonder how seriously the Board should take comments from people who admit that they pay no attention to what is happening. This topic has been heavily covered by the Kankakee Valley Post News.

After about two hours of the meeting, the Board, which had only three of its five members attending, voted to table the matter until its July 15 meeting. At that meeting there will be no public comments. The Board will discuss the matter and vote.