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HomeMy WebLinkAbout2017-05-17Dryden Ag Committee May 17, 2017 Page 1 of 4 Dryden Ag Advisory Committee May 17, 2017 Special Meeting to consider a resolution supporting the proposed moratorium on industrial solar. Members Present: Kim LaMotte, Jeremy Sherman, Steve Foote and Brian Magee Liaisons Present: John Kiefer, Planning Board and Craig Schutt The meeting was called to order at 7:40 AM Several members are interested in getting more information and more assurances regarding the impact on farming and farm land. B. Magee-what is the Planning Board hoping to find out in the next six months? More information on the company? C. Schutt -they want more information on where the solar installations could be located and to look at the zoning law better. The Planning Board spent months coming up with the recommendations for the law which the Town Board asked them to do but when the Board got the recommendations they threw out a lot of the suggestions. They want more time to go back and review the law. J. Kiefer -despite the signs in the Village, the moratorium is not against industrial solar. The members of the Planning Board are not against industrial solar but we want to be a little more deliberate about the best place to put these things. Steve Foote has expressed concern about the tax implications. That is something I think is the local government’s responsibility to hear about and definite it. If it is true that you have no tax exposure, it needs to be real clear. It is something that I think the County needs to address. Until that happens we have people with potentially good sites that are less impactful than the ones we are looking at now who don’t want to get into the business because they don’t know. Another one is wetlands. I have heard people talk about the Army Corps of Engineers saying that solar panels don’t damage wetlands. On the agricultural soils map I have seen places that would be good soils if they were drained. These are places that farmers aren’t farming, maybe those are good places for solar but we really don’t know that yet. Given what this has done to our community, the Planning Board thinks it would serve the community better if we took a break from this and studied it a bit more and then move ahead. In the grand scheme of things, I don’t see a downside to the moratorium. It has come on awful quick. To the people that are living over near the Ellis tract project or the people who are offended by having something next to the cemetery, I think it is unfair to them to not be careful about it. C. Schutt -the resolution only applies to over 2mw. So if someone wanted to put a 2mg system in, they have no objection to that. J. Kiefer - Evan (Carpenter) is working with 2mw. Yes. J. Sherman - how big a 2 mg watt system is. 8-10 acres. C. Schutt - that the one they are proposing at Willow Glen is 4-5 times that size. Dryden Ag Committee May 17, 2017 Page 2 of 4 J. Kiefer - another thing that is important is the County has an energy plan to reduce green house gasses 80% by 2050. They had 8-10 steps to reach that goal and the one that talked about solar, 1.5% of the land area in the County will have solar farms on it. That is roughly a thousand acres or 200 mg watts of solar farms. The current Sun8 proposal was maybe 15% of that. If the county plan gets implemented as it is, it will be a lot of land that gets converted to solar and requires a lot of thought about where they can go. B. Magee - that means 100 of those the size of Cornell’s (in Harford). In terms of water, those are not absorbing water, they are shedding it. So if they are near wetlands it is going to do something more. They talk about grazing sheep but toxic plants, for sheep, grow in the wetlands. And the invasive species tend to go where it is wet. S. Foote - they will change the profile of the vegetation. When you start shading the land, it changes the plants. B. Magee -the solar companies are not going to go in with a hand sprayer (to kill the invasive and toxic species), they will use an aerial sprayer and what will that do to the wetlands? The people who think they are going to do this with sheep are going to have to realize that other methods will have to be implemented over 30 years to control this. S. Foote - it is like any other land, if you start letting it go first the burdocks and the like come in and then brush and trees. It all starts to go back to nature. K. LaMotte - bottom line is they didn’t even consider the ag perspective on this. C. Schutt - they never asked you guys for your perspective. J. Sherman - even county wide, too if they are thinking of putting them throughout the county. B. Magee - what are areas that you think of as more appropriate then? J. Sherman - all new construction. If the panels only last 30 years, the new roofs are supposed to last 50 years. B. Magee - there is a lot of state land that can’t be used for anything else. J. Kiefer - at 2mw you don’t have a lot of flexibility over where you put it. You can’t take the power very far. But if you can combine a bunch of them, you get the economy of scale, and you can run more electric lines. The one by the cemetery is going all the way to Peruville Road. In order to be flexible where they put these, they need to be bigger. If you look at the committee that did the work for the county, they are very talented people but there were no farmers, they are technicians and politicians. He thinks there are places where these larger systems can go but not without a lot of careful thought about what it means to the Ag community, for example. This needs a bit more thought. B. Magee - the people who are in favor of it are almost fanatic. The attitude is we have to get it going right now or the world is going to blow up. J. Sherman asked what would happen if the county is at 80% renewable by 2050? Fines or what? Dryden Ag Committee May 17, 2017 Page 3 of 4 J. Kiefer - there were no laws passed, they are just recommendations. Lots of people are worried about climate change; I sure am. But I think Dryden can afford to wait and be more deliberate and planful about this. S. Foote - we have to contribute to helping but there is so much going on in China and other 2nd and 3rd world countries that are just starting to come on-line that the little bit we do here is really not much but we have to lead. C. Schutt - just the companies that build these things in China are some of the biggest polluters. J. Kiefer - that is what the Planning Board wanted to do, to be fair to the people who are most directly affected by this, we want to be more thoughtful about how we are going to roll it out. C. Schutt -I believe that the Planning Board recommendations included prime soils and soils of state wide importance. J. Kiefer doesn’t remember that specific detail. (review of minutes from the Planning Board meeting January 17, 2017 does not mention soils of state wide importance). J. Kiefer - the industrial solar came right at the end and we really didn’t have time. I am not sure we could have, what has happened over the past couple of months has been instructional for all of us. No one knew this would blow up into the big mess that it did. We need to think about it and say ok, there were some things that we haven’t anticipated. J. Sherman - we are lucky we have farmers that want to see farmland and not solar. Farmers are being offered big money. S. Foote - $24,000 per parcel per year for 20 years was offered but what is a parcel? A 62 acre parcel of which they are using 42 acres but what is considered a parcel? He has not gotten an answer to that. J. Sherman - everyone sees their land as retirement. S. Foote - if the solar company sets the price ($24,000 per year) but the assessment decides to make a buck by assessing the property for the industrial use, the land owner is in trouble. J. Sherman - what happens with the panels at the end of the contract? They are supposed to take them down. S. Foote - it is just like the gas thing. We had a lease 30 years ago and it has been sold 6 times. We are trying to get the lease cleared. B. Magee - maybe that is part of their strategy. Sell it a few times so you can’t track it down. J. Sherman - wetlands sound better than farmland but I don’t know how they are not going to destroy the habitat by going in and putting these things up. S. Foote - it is going to change the vegetation under the panels. J. Sherman - Cornell is expanding at East Hill Plaza, are they putting in solar there? They plan on putting a whole new subdivision where the ball fields are. B. Magee - Cornell doesn’t care about farming any more, they did away with Farm Service. Dryden Ag Committee May 17, 2017 Page 4 of 4 J. Sherman - the farm teaching program they used to have, they don’t do that anymore either. B. Magee - the vet school is just cats and dogs. S. Foote offered the following resolution: We, the members of the Town of Dryden Agriculture Advisory Committee, are not opposed to industrial solar but are concerned with the placement of industrial solar. We believe that not all aspects of industrial solar have been explored. We are very concerned with the loss of agricultural land to solar. The loss of this land would be huge encumbrance to our local farm economy. We are further concerned with the solar companies offering large amounts of money to rent agriculture land without knowing all of the facts and obligations that will be absorbed by the renter. We need to take our time to make sure the agricultural interest is thought of throughout the process. The motion was seconded by K. LaMotte and unanimously approved by attending members. The meeting was adjourned at 8:10AM. Respectfully Submitted, Erin A. Bieber Deputy Town Clerk