During the public‑comment portion of the Marion County Commission meeting, a resident who identified herself as Diane gave an extended statement alleging that mapping and documentation errors affected the county’s 2019 protest petition related to Expedition Wind.

Diane said her summary relied on under‑oath testimony by a planning consultant, Russ Avey, and on an independent landman report by J. Fred Hamburg Inc. (project manager Christopher C. Bass). She told commissioners that the consultant and county GIS staff used shapefiles and call‑by‑call legal descriptions that contained inaccuracies and that Expedition Wind’s submitted shapefile placed the 1,000‑foot notification buffer inside leased‑land boundaries rather than outside them, a placement she said would limit who received statutory notice.

"What Expedition Wind did ... is they put their thousand foot buffer inside the 80, inside the boundaries. So nobody could protest," Diane said, and she cited Bates numbers and deposition excerpts she said would show missing or inaccurate legal descriptions.

Diane also said a Marion County GIS specialist, Brandon Rudkin (named in her statement), reviewed the submitted shapefile and found distances that were "consistently not 1,000 feet," and she cited a landman review that, she said, showed dozens of legal descriptions with inaccuracies or omissions. She asserted that a corrected calculation would have produced a protest petition result exceeding the 20% threshold (she stated an adjusted figure of 61.14%), which, she said, would have required a supermajority vote.

The public comment referenced depositions, CORA (Kansas open‑records) requests, and a prior commission meeting in April 2019; no representative from Expedition Wind responded during the meeting. County staff did not present counterevidence on the record at this session. Commissioners did not move to take immediate action on the allegations during the meeting.

Because the statements cited depositions and a landman report and pertain to an ongoing or past legal dispute, the claims in Diane’s comment remain allegations in this public forum and were not resolved during the meeting.