Our community fully supports our Board of Zoning Appeals (BZA) to properly administer the Zoning Ordinance and to protect the Citizens. In November of 2024, the BZA rightfully denied Orion’s Idlewild special use application to cover thousands of productive farm acres with utility-scale/industrial solar that proposed to generate energy for the grid instead of the community. The leases would encumber the land for decades. Orion has appealed the decision and has a judicial review pending.

We are also grateful to our county commissioners for implementing a temporary moratorium on new Utility-Scale Solar applications on Agriculturally Zoned Farms. The moratorium granted the county crucial time to review and amend the existing UDO (Unified Development Ordinance). Unfortunately, the moratorium excluded Orion’s Idlewild application encompassing thousands of productive farmland acres.

We also support our Plan Commission members with the very difficult work they are tasked with – to make recommendations to the commissioners on changes to the UDO and to enforce the ordinance.

The Plan Commission appointed a Technical Committee to explore and update critical ordinance deficiencies and to recommend revisions. The committee invested many exhaustive hours in their deliberations. The final committee meeting was held on March 18^th with land owners leased to Orion and represented by counsel in attendance. Unfortunately, without any published notice of this meeting, and no video or minutes documenting the meeting, the public did not have a fair opportunity to participate. 

Also concerning is the Tech Committee’s recommendation to limit the maximum project size to 400 acres that was removed and replaced with 4,000 maximum acres allowed in the county. This change conveniently happens to cover Orion’s Idlewild project on appeal.

Furthermore, the tech committee had discussed adopting the USDA Land Capability Classifications that would protect productive farmland on classes I-IV. However, this condition was entirely omitted from the recommended changes and was not even discussed by the Plan Commission at their May 6th meeting, 

Unlike other compromised counties that have had their officials exposed in conflicts of interest we hope our elected and appointed officials will indeed honor their oath to serve the people over big solar developers. Developers with even bigger pockets stuffed full of our tax dollars attempting to buy their way into a county.