The public comment portion of Monday’s Grant County Commissioners meeting was full of citizens concerned about solar.
Solar was not on the agenda, but the commissioners always have a portion of the meeting set aside for members of the public to address a concern or ask a question. Several dozen people showed up to Monday’s meeting, far less than the 250-300 who showed up to the Area Plan Commission’s meeting on Dec. 4, but still an unusually large crowd for a county commissioners meeting.
The large turnouts to both the APC and commissioners’ meetings revolve around the conflict over solar farms. Over a year ago, the commissioners passed a solar ordinance known as Draft Four, which requires solar farm setbacks of at least 300 feet from any structure. They passed Draft Four instead of Draft Seven, which required 1320-foot setbacks, which would have effectively eliminated most, if not all, of Grant County as eligible for solar farms.
No official action or new steps have taken place to explain the recently renewed outcry against solar farms.
Whenever the commissioners open the floor for public comment, one of the commissioners reads a list of guidelines for comment, which include a three-minute time limit and expectations of professionalism and courtesy. The guidelines usually limit a group or cause to having one representative who speaks on behalf of the group. In this case, since so many people wanted to speak about solar, the commissioners decided to allow for 20 minutes of comments on solar so multiple people could speak.
Myron Brankle spoke at the meeting to ask if the commissioners would commit to coming to a meeting organized by the public to answer questions.
The commissioners said they were still “contemplating” the matter and looking into logistics.
“We’ll take care of the location,” Commissioner Steve Wright said.
“No, we will,” Brankle said. “Because we elected you and we pay you.”
“And we’re the guys who call the meetings,” Wright replied.
“No, this would be a meeting we call, because the commissioners have never met with the public,” Brankle said. “I mean, it’s a meeting that all Grant County can ask a question. It doesn’t necessarily have to be on solar, but the commissioners have never been open to meeting with the public and answering questions. And today, we just want ‘yes,’ [or] ‘no.’”
Wright and Commissioner Ron Stewart indicated openness to a meeting that was held at a time that worked with their schedules and was conducted in an orderly, professional manner without devolving into personal attacks.
Commissioner Mark Bardsley, who joined the meeting online via a video call, said that he currently is tied up with family medical issues for at least the next month that would make it difficult for him to commit to such a meeting, but also brought up a logistical concern.
“The question I still have is coming to a meeting that is not a public hearing may put some unique restrictions on the commissioners, which, it may be easier to actually have a public hearing that the commissioners call,” Bardsley said. “Again, we’d have to talk to the attorney about that.”
The commissioners said that the concern was that if even two members attended the meeting Brankle proposed, they would have a quorum and would therefore be constrained by the legalities of open-door law.
One attendee who spoke, Dallas Street, asked the commissioners to vote on a moratorium.
“Can we agree on a moratorium? Can you guys vote and call a moratorium for any industrial solar larger than ten acres until we can figure out what’s going on? Can you table it?” Street asked. “Because if we can’t, what’s going to happen? We’re going to leave, and word’s going to get out that you guys didn’t vote on the moratorium right now, and so it just still continues to look like there’s shady stuff going on under the radar that we don’t get to know about.”
Street said he understood there were legalities to consider about a public meeting, but that it felt like the commissioners were trying to delay the issue with the hopes that people would get tired and give up.
“…To us, it looks like we’re just pushing it down the road right now, and we’re just getting verbal service, and we’re not getting any action,” Street said. “Can we just hold a vote? Let’s put a moratorium on it until we can talk about it and figure out what’s going on. That puts the onus on all of us. You guys vote for a moratorium, we work with you to have a meeting, and we get it all laid out, and the sooner we can do that and we can put all the pieces together, we can lift the moratorium, and then we can start working solar if that’s what everyone decides to do.”
Wright said the public comment portion of a meeting is intended for public comments only, not votes, and that the commissioners did not have legal counsel present at the meeting to advise them about the legality of voting on a moratorium.
One community member who spoke asked the commissioners to look up the definition of democracy.
“This is just a democracy, and you just need to do your job,” he said. “I don’t understand why we are being called a mob for creating a democracy.”
His comment about a mob is in reference to a comment Wright made at the APC meeting.
According to Merriam-Webster, the definition of democracy is, “a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections.”
In the case of Grant County, officials like the county council or county commissioners are the system of representation that the county’s voters selected in free elections. Some of those offices will be up for election in the 2024 general election, at which point voters will have the opportunity to exercise the power to select different representatives if they are unhappy with the current officials representing them.
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