McHenry County hearing on Water Locust Solar project draws residents' health, drainage and property concerns

The McHenry County Zoning Board of Appeals on Oct. 9 held a quasi‑judicial hearing on application Z25‑0077, a request from Water Locust Solar LLC (a Cultivate Power affiliate) for a conditional‑use permit to build a community solar facility on property near the intersection of North Spring Grove Road and West Springwood Road in McHenry Township. The developer said the proposal would place roughly 5 megawatts of solar capacity on about 32 acres inside the fenced area of a parcel the presentation variously described as 41.3 acres and approximately 54 acres.

At the hearing, the petitioner’s attorney, Mark Gershon, said the project contains no battery energy storage and that the team has reduced the originally proposed footprint to remove the northwest corner of the site. “There is no battery storage in this project,” Gershon told the board when asked to confirm the record. Dylan Haber, identified in the presentation as the project’s lead developer with Cultivate Power, described technical details of the site: single‑axis tracker panels, a central equipment pad with inverters and a planned vegetative seed mix under the panels intended to meet Illinois pollinator and agricultural impact requirements.

The petitioner presented a suite of documents for the record, including a property valuation report and what the team described as an Agricultural Impact Mitigation Agreement (AIMA). The developer…