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Wright County restores surety table in solar ordinance; board approves summary publication
Summary
The county updated its land-use code to reinstate a surety and escrow table for utility-scale solar projects that was omitted during a prior codification. The board approved the ordinance amendment (25.1) and a resolution (25.34) to publish summary language rather than the full ordinance.
Wright County commissioners unanimously approved an amendment to the county land-use code (Ordinance 25.1) that reinstates a table establishing minimum surety and escrow amounts for solar projects and approved a separate resolution (25.34) to publish summary language of the amendment rather than printing the full ordinance.
County staff said the surety table had been adopted during the 2021 moratorium review but was inadvertently omitted during a full code rewrite and codification in early 2022. The amendment restores the table and sets minimum surety amounts scaled by project megawatt size; staff said the amounts were increased from the earlier 2021 figures and indexed for inflation.
"This is a solar ordinance amendment that, when we went through the moratorium in 2021... we did adopt an amendment that included a table for the surety and escrow amounts," a planner or staff member told the board. The staff member said the county's current codification process posts amendments on the county's publishing site and waits for the codifier to recodify the ordinance, which is why the earlier amendment was missed.
Commissioner Shane moved to approve Ordinance 25.1; Commissioner Holland seconded. The board then unanimously approved Resolution 25.34 to publish summary language for the amendment, a cost-saving step staff said avoids paying to print the entire chart and full ordinance text in the legal notice.
County staff described the action as corrective maintenance tied to the county's previous change from conditional-use permits to interim-use permits for certain solar project reviews. The amendment updates surety amounts and restores the missing codified language so the county's code and online records match.
