Proposed solar site draws crowd to planning board hearing
May 19—Joe Bork has been living in the Town of Lockport for 17 years. He's raised a family, planted a garden and now cares for his grandchild in the same home, across from which stood a pasture. Now that pasture has been proposed to be a part of a 45-acre solar energy site and Bork is left with a view that may very well be one of the best in Niagara County, but that he may be only able to revisit by photograph or memory.
"Point blank, I don't want it to be there," Bork said of the proposed project. "That's what sold me on the house, the view, right there." His neighbor, Karl Kowalski, is set to lease his land to a West Coast solar company, Renewable Properties.
On Tuesday night, the Town of Lockport Planning Board listened to speakers during a public hearing, all of whom but one opposed the project on Slayton Settlement Road.
"I'm strongly in favor of allowing the Kowalski's to proceed with the proposed project on Slayton Settlement Road," Stephen Carden, a town resident, said. "It complies with the guidance laid out by the Town Board in the Town Code for the zoning of such proposed projects."
Carden was not the loudest voice, however. Other speakers included John Syracuse of the Niagara County Legislature and chairman of the Niagara County Agricultural and Farmland Protection Board who was constrained, as were all speakers, to a three-minute limit to address the planning board.
"As chair of the Niagara County Agriculture and Farmland Protection Board, I offer the following comment as it relates to the above mentioned project," Syracuse read from an email he had sent to the Town of Lockport, but which there had been no reply. "The general consensus of the Niagara County Agricultural and Farmland Protection Board as it relates to industrial solar projects is concerned with the exchange of viable agricultural land for industrial use. Any action that would remove land for farming is frowned upon."
A planning board member noted that the board had received the email after Syracuse was finished speaking.
Another speaker was James Phipps, who had time from other speakers donated to him to build a case before the board on his concerns with the decommissioning of the site in 35 years time.
"They make no provision in their cleanup decommissioning ... there's nothing in there for an environmental event, there's nothing in there for raising the bar on solar decommissioning. Their recycling versus landfill costs for 19,000 panels? They just ignored it," Phipps said. "In 31 years there's going to be 50 million solar panels and they're going to be filling landfills at the cost of $100 a pop to transport them to someplace where they can use them. That's the future vision."
Phipps said later that if Renewable Properties does not exist in 35 years, the bond they're leaving with the Town of Lockport to complete the cleanup of the proposed site will be far less than what is needed to fully bring the land to agricultural status.
Barbara Outten, a spokesperson for Protecting Our Rural Communities (PORC) and resident of Hartland, also addressed the board.
"We'd like you to strike down the project," she said. "My family in particular comes from a long lineage of farmers that dates back to the Revolutionary War. The Town of Lockport in Niagara County provides food and dairy products, not only to local counties throughout the state, but it is also the bread basket for all. For the whole country and the state especially. By opening the door and allowing even one of these projects, you're opening the door for assisting land owners by dividing up their properties into parcels just so they can retire and still get an income off their lands, and move out of state."
Outten said that the domino effect of multiple parcels being leased to solar companies would be catastrophic to the rural landscape and way of life for Niagara County residents.
Brian Madigan, project manager for Renewable Properties, spoke of the resistance to the site after the public hearing was closed.
"I think there's an emotional component here. There are feelings involved in people's interest to personal property rights," Madigan said. "I think it comes down to facts versus feelings and I think the fact is that we have presented an application that complies with the ordinance and demonstrated through all our different materials that it complies with the ordinance. There's really not a strong defensible reason to deny the project, but that's for the planning board to decide."
"This is not the ideal outcome, to get to this stage in the process and have this much opposition," he said. "I took the lack of attendance to the public hearings as people were generally in favor for it. If no one says anything you have to assume it's not a big deal, right? ... We definitely sent out mailers to many of the neighbors in 2019, so they would have the same opportunity as Mr. Kowalski if they were interested in solar."