Ordinance moves to the Board of Supervisors for public hearings
By Heather Michon
Correspondent
The Planning Commission held a lengthy public hearing on Tuesday night (Sept. 10) on a proposed ordinance that would dramatically impact solar farm development in Fluvanna County.
The word of the night was “setbacks.”
The key recommendations under discussion came from the Solar Ordinance Review Committee, made up of Planning Commissioners Lorretta Johnson-Morgan and Kathleen Kilpatrick and Supervisors Tony O’Brien and Tim Hodge.
The ordinance would create a countywide solar district called S-1. Land currently zoned as A-1 (Agricultural) would have to be rezoned as S-1 before development could proceed.
Within S-1 zoned properties, small-scale solar generation facilities would be allowed as a by-right use, but utility-scale solar facilities – those generating two megawatts or more – would need a Special Use Permit and would face a long list of requirement for siting, construction, screening and fencing, management, and decommissioning.
The committee recommended no more than 500 acres for any single utility-scale solar farm and capped the total amount of county acreage open for utility-scale solar at three percent, or around 5,400 acres. The ordinance would also limit development to no more than one percent of acreage per electoral district.
But it was the mandatory setbacks, the distances from nearby properties and features, that brought home how restrictive the ordinance could be to those seeking to build utility-scale solar fields:
375 feet from adjacent property lines
500 feet from nearby dwellings
500 feet from major roadways
500 feet from ponds and perennial streams
1,000 feet from the James, Rivanna, and Hardware rivers
During the public hearing, Skyler Zunk of Energy Right Virginia praised the county for its work, but warned of unintended consequences.
“We did some back-of-the-envelope calculations, and a 375-foot setback on a 50-acre parcel would leave less than 25 percent of that land developable for a project,” he said. “If you have a 100-acre parcel with a 375-foot setback, 40 percent of that land would be usable, and that’s if there’s no streams.”
Henry Kingery of CEP Solar noted that a stream running down the middle of a property would exclude the equivalent of three football fields from development. “It’s not usable property,” he said.
During the commissioners deliberations, Kathleen Kilpatrick (Fork Union), who had sat on the review committee with Lorretta Johnson-Morgan (Columbia), said that some of the setbacks were arguably too wide.
She said she appreciated the public input, “but at the same time we need to be guided, particularly about the streams and ponds issue, by the science that backs up in pretty significant ways how deep a riparian buffer should be to protect that resource from sedimentation, runoff, and to provide filtering—natural filters—and ensure water quality.”
The Chesapeake Bay Preservation Act recommends a 100-foot buffer from ponds and streams, and county ordinances have buffers of between 50-100 feet. This means “we’re going five times what four states signed on to as an adequate riparian buffer. That concerns me.”
Johnson-Morgan said she had reached out to members of the community and they were adamant about the buffers to protect their ponds and streams.
“I’d like to see the science. I’m hearing it, but I haven’t really seen it. If science is out there, it should be made available to us. Then we should know where to go find it, so I don’t have to sit there and search, search, search,” she said.
Commissioners deliberated for over an hour on various aspects of the ordinance proposal before agreeing to approve it – with some recommendations.
With the Planning Commission approval, the ordinance package will go on to the Board of Supervisors for another public hearing and vote, likely within the next two months.
Because the supervisors can make their own changes to the ordinance, commissioners requested that they revisit and potentially modify the setbacks before a final vote.
Along with developers and energy experts, the commissioners also heard from many Fluvanna residents, many of whom praised them for their protection of Fluvanna County’s rural character.
“We have a beautiful county,” said Nadine Armstrong, “and I would like to continue to see it stay that way. I know we have to continue to make new advances to improve the county, but I think we have to do it cautiously, in order to make sure that we’re protecting what makes this county special.”
“There are 95 counties in Virginia,” said Kat Campbell. “So if the people in here who aren’t from here don’t like the guidelines that y’all set, there’s 94 others you can go to.”
