Solar company, advocates say county heading for effective ‘ban’ as solar codes move ahead
Residents who fought one project call rewrite of large-scale solar codes a compromise. APC votes 13-3 to move recommendations to county commissioners.
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SOLAR COMPANY, ADVOCATES CALL NEW ZONING CODES AN EFFECTIVE ‘BAN’
A manager with a company behind a proposed – and hotly contested – 1,700-acre solar farm in western Tippecanoe County said Wednesday that 11 pages of new zoning regulation recommendations spurred, in large part, by that project had enough kill switches embedded that they would make future utility-scale projects “untenable” in the county.
A Purdue professor who was part of an eight-member committee charged over the past eight months with helping rewrite the county’s zoning codes said the “extreme provisions” in the final recommendations – approved Wednesday night on a 13-3 vote by the Area Plan Commission – were so bent against solar development that she asked if she could have her name removed from a report heading next to Tippecanoe County commissioners.
On the other side, residents who had spent the past year pushing back on a solar farm near their properties and lobbying for tighter county restrictions brought a checklist of details Wednesday night they argued weren’t covered or were insufficient in the new collection of land restrictions, setbacks and acreage caps on the verge of being the county’s new standard for large-scale solar.
“I know some of it’s not working out the way everybody expected,” Tom Murtaugh, a county commissioner and a member of the Area Plan Commission, said Wednesday.
But are commissioners comfortable with the outcome, as they face a final vote slated for May 18?
