Grundy County Board approves Gore Road solar project

The Grundy County Board approved a solar project from ECA Solar on Gore Road west of the Ritchie subdivision on Monday night on a vote of 13 yes, one no and one abstain.

The one abstain came from Eric Rasmusson, who said he had a conflict of interest because the land being used for the project is land he’s farmed.

“It’s very good soil, although it has about 15 pockets of lower parts of the field,” Rasmusson said. “If it’s a wet spring, there’s substantial crop loss. On a dry year like this year, I got everything planeted. Everything is really good, but it’s kind of an anomaly that it’s so dry.”

Rasmusson said he’s worked with Vincent Moschella, from ECA Solar, and his team since they contacted him.

“They’ve done everything they said they were going to do,” Rasmusson said. “They tracked all the tile lines. They’re going to upgrade those to plastic, if there’s any that were clay tile. They’ve been really good to work with.”

Moschella addressed the county board during the public commenting period, addressing concerns that the City of Morris has that this project doesn’t fit in with its comprehensive plan.

The Morris City Council has voted its own objection to the project to submit to the county board in February.

“We remain interested in continuing our conversations with the City of Morris should they be interested in speaking with us regardless of the outcome tonight,” Moschella said. “We put it all the way to the south of the property. We had heard through the entire process that both the City of Morris and everyone else had other plans for the property in the future.”

Moschella said some of those plans were 20 or 30 years in the future, but they wanted to preserve those plans by abutting the project with Interstate 80.

“By leaving the northern 118 acres open, there is no restriction on whatever the City of Morris or Grundy County wants to do with that property as far as development,” Moschella said.

Morris City Planner Mike Hoffman said the City of Morris would like to annex the property into the city and it’s concerned about it taking up the frontage along Interstate 80.

“We think that visibility and frontage has significant value to businesses,” Hoffman said. “If you look up and down I-80, you see lots of businesses with their signs on their buildings, and that visibility is an important marketing thing that we think is something to preserve.”

Grundy County State’s Attorney Russ Baker said he doesn’t believe there was an articulable reason to reject the project beyond Morris’s lukewarm objection.

“The only ruling we have so far in the citing statue is from Judge (Sheldon) Sobol, who’s basically saying that if they’re in compliance with all the land use requirements, if all the boxes are checked, the language of the statute says you must approve it,” Baker said.