County committee delays final vote on wind and solar ordinance, asks staff to monitor Coles County hearings

A committee of the Effingham County Board reviewed a draft ordinance regulating wind and solar projects and agreed to place the ordinance on the full board agenda while staff monitor a neighboring county's hearings and report back.

The committee said the most important issue is whether legal challenges to Coles County's ordinance — and the hearing officer decisions and any subsequent litigation — will reveal problems the county should anticipate and address before adopting its own rules. Committee members discussed application and permit fees, hearing procedures, and which board body should hear applications.

Committee member Chris said the county should "monitor what's going on" in Coles County to learn whether that county's ordinance withstands legal challenges and whether fees are adequate. A county staff person identified as Kelly told the committee that Coles County began with a wind application fee of $150,000 and that, after multiple hearings, staff there recommended starting at $200,000 with $50,000 increments for reimbursement. "They started with a wind application fee of a hundred and 50,000," the staff member reported, and "we should probably look at at least starting at 200,000, and then having the 50,000 dollar increments after." The committee's current draft sets the application reimbursement at a lower amount (described in the draft as 50,000).

Kelly also described permit-fee approaches used in Coles County: $25 per foot for wind-turbine height and $1,500 per megawatt for solar permits. Committee members said repeated hearings there — which Kelly attributed to strong public participation and contracted hearing officers, engineers and per-diem costs — had driven up Coles County's administrative costs and made its initial fee insufficient.

Aaron, identified in the meeting as a county staff member who answered legal questions, warned committee members that their authority to regulate wind and solar is constrained by state statute and that some regulatory limits will apply only if the county first adopts specific rules. "By and large, what we're allowed to put in place as far as limitations on them ... are only in place if we put them in place," he said, adding that further legal review might be necessary about whether fees could be collected if a project were already under way.

Committee members asked Kelly to prepare an after-action summary of Coles County's hearings listing common legal questions, procedural issues that required multiple sessions, and items the hearing officer flagged for legal review. The committee also agreed that a different board body should hear wind and solar matters — either a standalone wind-and-solar committee or a designated committee separate from the road-and-bridge or similar routine committees — and asked members who want to serve on that committee to notify staff.

Rather than take final action at the committee meeting, the committee chair said the item will be included on the full board agenda so the full board can either adopt the ordinance or table it pending the staff report. "If it's not ready, it can be tabled," the chair said. No ordinance was adopted at the meeting.

The committee requested that staff monitor Coles County's hearings for legal challenges, advise whether additional application or permit fees are needed, and return with a short briefing to identify recurring questions the committee should resolve before any final vote.

Background: Committee members compared the wind-and-solar review to a prior landfill hearing that the county held, which they said was completed in a single, organized session; they want the wind-and-solar process to be more expedited and less costly. The committee noted one nearby private parcel sale and preliminary interest from an airport commission as local examples of potential solar development. The committee did not adopt final fee amounts or hearing procedures and directed staff to report back.