The Real Battle for Jefferson County Indiana

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. Energy generated from this project would be fed to the grid and not our local community. The project leases would encumber the land for decades.

Orion has appealed the decision. A judicial review is currently pending pending.

We are also grateful to our county commissioners for implementing the requested 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 Unified Development Ordinance (UDO). Unfortunately, it was too late to apply to Orion’s pending Idlewild application covering 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 3/18/2025 with land owners leased to Orion represented by counsel in attendance. There was no published notice for this meeting, and no video or minutes of record. The public did not have an equal opportunity to participate.

Also concerning is the Tech Committee’s recommendation to limit the maximum project size to 400 acres was removed and replaced with 4,000 maximum acres allowed in the county. This acreage is measured from inside the fenced project area and not the entire leased acres. For Orion the original proposed project area before it was increased was 2,050 acres, but the leases cover 3,324 acres). This change conveniently happens to cover Orion’s Idlewild project.

Furthermore, the tech committee had discussed adopting the USDA Land Capability Classifications which 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 faithfully 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.