Are Ohio solar critics speaking as elected officials — or as neighbors?

In Ohio, county and township officials have a lot of influence over permitting decisions for wind and solar farms.

So when local elected officials oppose a project, it matters whether they are doing so in their official role or as private individuals, says the developer of a central Ohio solar project.

Open Road Renewables is seeking to build an agrivoltaics project of up to 500 megawatts in Logan County, where a majority of public commenters support the project. However, the state’s deference to local opponents, through legislation and regulatory decisions, has made Ohio a challenging place to develop large clean energy projects.

The Grange Solar Grazing Center is exempt from part of a 2021 state law that lets counties and townships block large wind and solar projects, but two local officials will have seats at the table when the Ohio Power Siting Board decides on its permit later this year. The board has cited local government opposition in other cases as a reason to rule that a project is not in the public interest.

Last Friday, the board’s staff issued a report that recommends denying a permit for the Grange Solar agrivoltaics project because of opposition by local government officials. But the report didn’t address problems that the developer noted earlier this month about possible conflicts of interest.

Whether recent comments filed by local officials in its case represent official actions or personal views may seem ​“like a minor distinction,” said Doug Herling, vice president for Open Road Renewables, ​“but it’s potentially a really important one in these [power siting board] cases.”

The company is urging state regulators to view many of the comments as personal opinions rather than official government positions. Some local governments have formally weighed in, but Open Road alleges the county and some townships didn’t follow open meetings rules or allowed members with conflicts of interest to participate in votes.

“None of this is an indictment of the character of the elected officials,” Herling said. However, the company wants ​“to clarify whether actions that have been taken are formal resolutions” so that regulators know how much weight to give those comments.

How state regulators factor local views into permitting decisions is the subject of a pending case before the Ohio Supreme Court, in which a solar developer is challenging the state siting board’s use of local opposition to justify its decision to reject a permit.

Whether comments represent official action versus individual opinions affects how the state board perceives them, according to Heidi Gorovitz Robertson, a professor at Cleveland State University College of Law.

“Official actions have an imprimatur that makes them seem weightier,” she said, and comments disguised as or mistaken for official action likely will be given more weight than they’re due.

Conflicts of interest

A Feb. 10 motion by Grange Solar’s developer says township and village trustees have conflicts of interest where they or their family members own property next to a project. Support for the developer’s argument comes from a January advisory opinion from the Ohio Ethics Commission, which found that a Knox County commissioner, Drenda Keesee, is prohibited from ​“from voting, discussing, deliberating, recommending, formally or informally lobbying, or taking any other action” in her official capacity on the Frasier Solar case.

According to the motion in the Grange Solar case, that problem applies to people serving several villages and townships, including all three Bloomfield Township trustees. Canary Media left messages for the two Bloomfield Township trustees for whom Logan County’s Board of Elections provided valid phone numbers but received no response.

In other instances, local government officials failed to follow Ohio’s open meetings law or their own requirements for official action, the motion argues. Daniel Bey, a lawyer representing the village of Russells Point, declined to comment on the allegations about improper procedures, including a filing signed when there was no council meeting.

Open Road Renewables has also challenged Logan County’s initial petition to intervene in the case, saying it wasn’t properly adopted by a majority of its three county commissioners because one member abstained and another should have due to a conflict of interest. While anyone can submit public comments in a case, intervenors play a more formal and active role.

“If the point is for these resolutions to be the way that local communities can officially weigh in on projects or renewable development in general, you want to make sure those are adopted in a way that actually reflects the opinion of the community and are enacted in a way that would follow the usual legal standards,” said Dave Anderson, policy and communications manager for the Energy and Policy Institute, a watchdog group.

G. Russel Hurley, a McArthur Township trustee, said he feels the developer has been using ​“dirty tactics.” 

“I guess they’re just trying to take local government out of the equation,” Hurley said. 

According to Open Road Renewables, Hurley owns property next to the proposed development.

Logan County filed a new petition to intervene in the case on Feb. 14, and several townships did the same on Feb. 20. Five of the township trustees who signed resolutions about intervening are among those that the developer has accused of conflicts of interest.

In their Feb. 21 investigation report, staff at the Ohio Power Siting Board determined that the project would not be in the public interest, noting that objections from the local governments for Logan County, five townships, and a village were ​“especially prominent and overwhelmingly one-sided from the local government agencies. Staff believes that the public opposition will create negative impacts within the local community.”

The staff report did not address any of the legal and ethical issues raised in the developer’s motion. The power siting board will consider the report when it makes its final decision following an evidentiary hearing in the spring.