There was ample chance for input

Where have you been?

A group of Jay County residents came to Thursday’s Jay County Plan Commission meeting to oppose the planned Skycrest Solar project in Penn and Jackson townships.

That is their right. The public hearing is designed for that purpose.

But Thursday’s meeting marked the first time there has been any sort of significant public opposition to a solar project in the county. And there has been ample opportunity to voice that opposition for nearly three years.

Jay County began the process of writing an ordinance governing solar facilities in August 2018. Shane Houck, then a member of the plan commission, had pushed the group to address solar farms, anticipating that there would be interest in Jay County. Jay County Building and Planning sought volunteers to be on the committee to help write the solar rules as well as to update the wind farm rules. (The department’s email and phone number were published in the newspaper for that purpose.)

Over the course of the next 10 months, those who volunteered to be a part of the committee held a series of meetings. They studied the limited solar ordinance examples they could find. They drew from the existing wind farm ordinance. And they wrote the proposed rules.

Those rules were then discussed at a plan commission meeting in June 2019. Plan commission made minor changes and gave initial approval to the ordinance two months later. It was subject to a public hearing in September 2019. Jay County Commissioners then reviewed the rules in November 2019, suggested changes and sent them back to plan commission. Plan commission rejected those suggestions in December 2019 and sent the ordinance updates back to commissioners, who approved them a couple of weeks later.

Each of those meetings presented an opportunity for members of the public to weigh in. For the most part, they did not.

During the year-plus process of writing, adjusting and approving the solar rules, about a dozen stories appeared in the newspaper addressing the issue.

And solar has been in the news plenty since. A possible project was mentioned in conjunction with the completion of Bitter Ridge Wind Farm in September. We wrote a lengthy piece in November noting that four companies had expressed interest in solar facilities in Jay County. Invenergy visited county council in February to introduce plans for Skycrest Solar.

That’s nearly three years of public discussion about solar projects, all covered in this newspaper and by WPGW Radio.

To show up in opposition Thursday night and act as if decisions were made before there was an opportunity to comment publicly is disingenuous at best. The public was offered ample opportunity to have a say in how the solar rules were written, to comment on them before they were approved and to raise concerns since the first project was proposed.

Where were you? — R.C.