In addition to encouraging readers to become active, informed voters, this space gives the occasional nudge to taking the bold step of seeking public office – especially at the local level, where competition can be relatively scarce given the outsized potential for significant influence.
On Thursday the State Board of Elections published the 2024 Candidate Guide, which is available as one of several downloads at the “Running For Office” landing page on the agency’s website (elections.il.gov, or skip to the page directly at tinyurl.com/Candidate2024). On Friday, it posted the Election & Campaign Finance Calendar. It’s not light reading, but with petition circulation starting Sept. 5 there’s no time like the present to get prepared.
INBOX: Charlie Eldredge, a longtime member of the McHenry County Zoning Board of Appeals, emailed regarding the effects of House Bill 4412, which gave state regulators power over county governments to restrict wind and solar farm construction:
“We have heard around 60 petitions for commercial solar facilities [1-10 megawatts] and one petition for a utility scale facility [300 mgw]. McHenry County established a policy strongly friendly to these projects, and early on developed a few conditions to protect the public and neighbors: 1. Screening and setbacks for the public along rights of way and adjacent to nonparticipating neighboring landowners. 2. Planting and maintenance of a careful list of native plants around and under the panels, to ensure cleaner water getting into the aquifer and soil improvement during the life of the project. 3. Robust security for decommissioning at the end of the project.
“We have never heard a word of objection that our carefully crafted conditions would have any impact on the viability of a single project. But all of them cost some money, and all have been gutted. Simply to add to the wealth of the project owners, at the risk and expense to the citizens of McHenry County.
“What irritates the County Board the most is not that our local authority has been stripped away, but that we are required to hold a zoning hearing, and then the County Board must vote, and that we have no lawful right to deny the petition. This is simply the state government acting, and seeking to shift responsibility for what they have done to the county, and duck it themselves.
“In the period from the first wave of community solar farm petitions [1-4 mgw] around 30 were approved, and single digits were turned down [in my often faulty memory four were rejected], so while our conditions were somewhat stricter than we are now permitted, we were not onerous. About six or seven have been built, all those who got the incentives in the various rounds of state incentives.”
• Scott T. Holland writes about state government issues for Shaw Media. Follow him on Twitter @sth749. He can be reached at sholland@shawmedia.com.
Media Feeds All
via Shaw Media Local https://ift.tt/HBQ94Cv
August 8, 2023 at 06:07AM
