County attorney urges legal review of wind-energy ordinance ahead of potential litigation

County Attorney John Keys told supervisors he had been tracking claims and disputes that could spill over into wind-energy litigation affecting Jackson County. He said he had discussed the matter with ICAP and outside counsel and recommended taking advantage of available ICAP legal-review hours to have a qualified firm scan county ordinances and orders for potential legal vulnerabilities.

"What they suggested, we might wanna do is use some of our... the counties get 5 legal hours a year... and so they said, if we want to, they can simply have... Hopkins and Buechner... review our orders to see if there's any potential areas that they might want to look at," Keys said, describing the option of using ICAP resources for a targeted review. Supervisors discussed protecting legal-hours capacity for other departments and the possibility of retaining a subject-matter expert if hours are unavailable.

No formal legal engagement was approved at the meeting; Keys said ICAP would check availability of review hours and the board asked him to follow up with recommendations based on that availability and potential subject-matter counsel if needed.