Bannock County staff propose single ordinance chapter to govern solar, wind and small reactors

Bannock County planning staff on Friday presented commissioners with a draft chapter to add alternative-energy provisions to the county’s Land Use and Development Ordinance, saying the change would keep definitions and conditional-use permit requirements together rather than creating overlapping, separate ordinances.

The draft, presented by Tristan Borquin, assistant planning director, consolidates rules for solar, wind and emerging small modular reactor technologies into a single chapter and is intended to clarify permitting, setbacks, scale determinations and decommissioning requirements ahead of public outreach and further drafting.

Planning staff told commissioners the chapter was designed to avoid redundancy between parallel ordinances and to keep definitions and conditional-use requirements together. “I have before you just a chapter that we would propose to place in the Land Use and Development Ordinance that would be the alternative energy provisions, but would still be within the overall document,” Borquin said.

Why it matters: the chapter would set the local standards that developers must meet before a conditional-use permit can be approved and would shape…