For a second straight meeting, the Marshall County Plan Commission was unable to approve the minutes for their executive session and regular meeting from February 22.
The hang-up revolves around comments made in the executive session that some members of the Commission desire to be included in the official minutes that may violate employee privacy laws. However, since there were not a sufficient number of Plan Commission members who had been at the meeting in February who were in attendance on Thursday, any vote had to be tabled again.
Along with the minutes from February, Plan Director Ty Adley again presented a summary of changes to the county ordinance involving commercial battery storage facility units being built in the county and the board opened the floor for a public hearing to again gain input as they consider those changes.
The main public concerns have repeatedly been on the issues of setbacks, safety, and noise along with restoration of the land once the facilities are decommissioned.
Adley researched several other county ordinances around the country on the facilities with a range of setback standards from 50 feet to 100 feet from property lines and 100 to 250 feet from residential structures. The current suggestion for the Marshall County ordinance would be 100 feet from property lines and 250 from residential structures.
James Hingston, the project consultant for Tenaska, the company that is hoping to build a battery storage facility in the county, was on hand to speak stating that his company would encourage a slight relaxing of those setback restrictions. He stated that the national standard for facilities like the one Tenaska hopes to build is 50 feet from property lines and 200 feet from residential structures.
Hingston said that the size of the setbacks would greatly affect the available project area for the size of normal projects like the one proposed for Marshall County of 10-20 acres. He said the size of the setbacks would actually encourage much larger scale projects in order to have the right amount of land available.
He also said it would be desirable to have flexibility to negotiate those setbacks with adjacent landowners if those landowners were open to that.
He also said that while a three-year review of the financial responsibility for decommissioning was not a problem he felt an agreed-upon impartial third-party arbitrator should be the judge in those reviews instead of the Marshall County Commissioners.
John Grolich, President of the Marshall County Fire Association, told the Plan Commission that his group has had multiple meetings with Tenaska regarding the proposed facility and the MCFA has been “pleased” with those meetings and the attention the company has given to emergency response and safety, saying that they have been eager to do whatever the fire service has proposed.
Steve Barry of the Marshall County Farm Bureau once again addressed the Commission re-stating that his organization was still in favor of a two-year moratorium to any project approval saying that there were still concerns regarding topsoil, tile lines, and drainage.
He told the board that topsoil was a living ecosystem that could not simply be piled up and then replaced and that tile damage on any project site would affect drainage on all the adjacent properties due to tiles being linked together across properties.
The objections of the vast majority of those not in favor of the battery systems remained the same and those who came forward to speak were in unity on the theme of “take our time”. They urged the Plan Commission to take all the time necessary to answer all the questions involved in the situation, many of which are still being researched.
The Marshall County Plan Commission agreed and tabled any decision for at least another month. A moratorium remains in place on the issue until October.
