A chamber of angry Porter County residents demanded at Monday evening’s Porter County Board of Commissioners meeting to know why Commissioner Laura Blaney, D-South, Porter County Development & Storm Water Management Director Bob Thompson, County Attorney Scott McClure, and former Board President Jeff Good left the public and current Board President Jim Biggs, R-North, out of months of communication regarding the drafting of a solar ordinance in 2019 and 2020.
Biggs, who was a board member, but not president, during the period in question, tried to skip the agenda item labeled “Malden Solar Project Update.” “We’re going to skip an update on the Malden Solar Project application,” he told the audience. “I just felt that we didn’t get this advertised in time to get people in front of us to listen to it. We’ll do that at a different meeting, at another meeting.
That previous solar ordinance, passed in March 2020, has become a flashpoint after Morgan Township resident Arvid Merkner revealed months of research he and fellow members of Citizens Against Malden Solar have done into emails between county officials and representatives of NextEra that they say show the county was working in concert with the company to draft an ordinance that was friendly to the energy giant, while keeping the public and Biggs in the dark.
“It’s very disappointing as president of the Board of Commissioners to have a letter like that going out and not be told what the content is,” Biggs said to Thompson, adding that he understood Thompson had been advised by attorney Robert Eherenman, who has been retained to advise the county on the matter, not to speak with anyone about the application. “It’s extremely frustrating.”
“‘I wanted to reach out to you since you sit on the Plan Commission and it’s in your district,’” Merkner said Thompson wrote to Blaney. That same day, Merkner said Thompson sent an email to a NextEra staffer that read in part “and to ask you to point me in a direction of a county or community that has what you consider to be a favorable ordinance to solar energy and solar farms.”
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