photo by: Austin Hornbostel/Journal-World

A standing room only crowd filled a meeting room at the Baldwin City Library Monday, Oct. 10, 2023, with many members of the public standing along the walls of the room during a two-hour public meeting about a revised draft of regulations for wind energy projects in Douglas County.

A group of planning leaders came to the Baldwin City library on Monday expecting to give a 30-minute talk about revisions to the county’s wind energy regulations. What they didn’t expect was that the standing-room-only crowd would talk over and interrupt them, voicing a litany of concerns and sometimes asking whether wind farms should be banned in Douglas County outright.

Dozens of county residents gathered at the library for the meeting about the second draft of the county’s revised regulations for personal and commercial-scale wind energy projects. It was intended to be an informational presentation about why the county’s code is being revised, what logic planning leaders used to create the new draft, and what the next steps in the process would be. Lawrence-Douglas County Planning Commission Chair Gary Rexroad, who is also leading a subcommittee formed in March to work on the rules, told the group he wanted there to be plenty of time for those who came to the meeting to speak with him and the other members of that subcommittee and planners Sandra Day and Cece Riley one-on-one.

But many in the crowd had something else in mind. After the roughly half-hour presentation, there were multiple disruptions from members of the public, who interrupted and talked over the meeting’s hosts. They wanted the rest of the evening to be more like an open forum, rather than the one-on-one discussion format Rexroad had planned for. Some attendees said that a public forum was what they were expecting, and that doing something different wouldn’t be fair to people who could otherwise have a chance to hear answers to questions they may not have thought to ask on their own.

From there, Rexroad, Day and Riley fielded questions for more than an hour. Attendees asked for more clarity about the revised rules’ standards for wind turbine sound levels, how they protect people who own a small amount of land, and how they determine who conducts a third-party review for a proposed wind project.

Some of the attendees were also skeptical of the process overall and had questions about why the county hadn’t simply banned wind farms within its borders altogether. Some wondered why the public process was moving so quickly — the second draft was published Sept. 26, but the first one has been publicly available since before the start of this year.

Others said they were concerned about the new rules potentially being rushed through before the two additional members of the newly expanded five-member County Commission could be seated. The two new seats will remain vacant for about another year; commissioners decided last year that instead of conducting a special election, their new colleagues should be selected during the next partisan election, which is the 2024 general election.

Rexroad said those were all valid concerns, but that they were not things the Planning Commission had jurisdiction over. The group was charged with coming up with improved regulations, he said, and must focus on that goal rather than the broader policy decisions that the county’s top leaders are responsible for making.

“We have to write these regulations as though they’re going to happen, as though the county said ‘We’re going to (have wind projects),'” Rexroad said. “That’s the only way we can make sure that we provide the right protections. If we pretend otherwise, we’re going to end up with something less than we should.”

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Monday’s meeting was the first of a slate of similar meetings scheduled for the next two weeks. They’re scheduled in advance of the Planning Commission’s Oct. 23 meeting, when the commission will host a public hearing about the rules. The Planning Commission has been in the process of revising those regulations so they better align with the county’s standards for solar projects approved in May 2022.

The Oct. 23 hearing is the next step in making the new wind rules official; if the Planning Commission votes in favor of them, they’ll move on to the Douglas County Commission for a final review at a future meeting. The County Commission is the governing body with the authority to give final approval to the regulations, as well as to charge groups like the Planning Commission with revising county rules in the first place, a point Rexroad made at Monday’s meeting.

Though most of Monday’s meeting was spent on the impromptu question-and-answer session, the presentation beforehand did provide some details on the depth and breadth of changes in the revised draft compared to the rules that have been on the books for more than six years.

One difference that Rexroad highlighted was the number of things that are specifically defined in the regulations. The original rules defined just five terms: “small” and “large” wind energy conversion systems, “prescribed burning,” road agreements for maintenance and “extraordinary events.” The revised rules define 21 terms, including “blade glint” — the intermittent reflection of sunlight off the surface of wind turbine blades — and “environmentally sensitive lands.”

The revised rules set much more specific limits on how much sound and flickering of light wind turbines can produce. For example, the original rules have no limits for the sound level produced by wind turbines, but the revised ones have different standards for what noise can be heard at the property line of someone who’s not participating in a wind energy project, as well as from homes and other structures nearby that would be occupied.

The time that developers have to file a decommissioning plan after individual turbines are abandoned is another significant change in the revised rules. The current rules require a decommissioning plan within 18 months of abandonment, while the revised rules cut that window down to just 90 days.

Rexroad said the Planning Commission later this month will be discussing the setback distance from a nonparticipating landowner’s property line and from a participating landowner’s home. The current draft of the revised regulations lists that distance as 1,500 feet, but the commission will be considering whether to increase it.

Rexroad showed a list of nearly two dozen more enhancements in the revised draft, including a number of management plans developers would be required to file for proposed projects; standards for how projects can affect wildlife and traffic; and more.

There will be more chances in the next week or so for the public to learn more about the revised regulations. The first opportunity will be this Sunday from 1 to 3 p.m. at the Flory Meeting Hall on the Douglas County Fairgrounds, 2120 Harper St. Another meeting will take place in Lawrence next Tuesday, Oct. 17 from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. at Greenbush Resource Center, 1104 East 1000 Road.

The final community meeting will take place Thursday, Oct. 19 from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. at Lecompton Historic High School, 640 E. Woodson Ave. in Lecompton.

Members of the public can provide comments to the Planning Commission at the Oct. 23 hearing, or submit them in advance by emailing windregs@lawrenceks.org or mailing their comment to the Lawrence Planning Office (Attn: Wind Regs), 1 Riverfront Plaza, Suite 320. Those comments must be received by 10 a.m. on the day of the hearing. A link to attend the meeting via Zoom will be provided closer to the meeting date on the City of Lawrence web page dedicated to updates on the revision process.