Eye On Illinois: Contention over wind/solar farm sites doesn’t always boil down to money

Local control. Economic development. Are they compatible?

I posed that question in the context of the power to choose locations for wind and solar farms in a January 2023 column, and nearly 18 months later the answer remains inconclusive.

The issue crystalized around House Bill 4412, which Democrats passed in the final days of the 102nd General Assembly. The law gave state regulators power over county government to restrict wind and solar farm construction. It negated old ordinances and gave counties 120 days to amend zoning rules to align with new provisions concerning setbacks, blade heights, sound limits and more.

Advocates said counties had been too restrictive, jeopardizing both major financial investments and a goal of dramatically shifting the state’s mix of power generation. This firmly aligned pro-environment lawmakers and organized labor looking to boost the market for construction jobs.

On the other side were farmers and county government officials who wanted to preserve prime agricultural land – or at the very least have the final say over what goes where. The counties understood the importance of zoning power because they backed state legislation in 2019 to take that power away from townships in otherwise unincorporated territory.

Gov. JB Pritzker eventually signed the bill into law, arguably reversing course from the 2022 campaign when he expressed a commitment to compromise.

Later that summer I began hearing from readers encountering the consequences of those actions. One was from Woodstock, upset McHenry County Zoning Board members said their hands were tied with respect to a flood of solar farm proposals. More recently the concern is coming from Bureau County, with advocacy not just for local control but also suggesting the state prioritize for this type of development sites like brownfields, industrial roofing or other non-arable property rather than looking first at top-tier planting acreage.

That context is essential when processing Thursday’s Associated Press report, with a Piper City dateline, headlined: “Wind power can be a major source of tax revenue, but officials struggle to get communities on board.”

The AP analyzed county tax data from Illinois, Iowa and Nebraska and “found wind companies rank among the biggest taxpayers in many rural communities, with their total tax bills at times outstripping that of large farms, power plants and other major businesses.” The report also found opposition to those developments increasing rapidly.

The report quotes Mike Marron, a former GOP state representative who leads economic development in Vermilion County. He favors “good neighbor agreements,” which are payments to every landowner within a certain distance from a wind farm.

Direct payments are easier to explain than a stable tax bill, but for some people, money will never be the most important factor.

This issue remains decidedly unsettled.

• Scott T. Holland writes about state government issues for Shaw Local News Network. Follow him on X @sth749. He can be reached at sholland@shawmedia.com.