photo by: Austin Hornbostel/Journal-World

A packed meeting room at the Douglas County Public Works building, 3755 E. 25th St., listens to public comment at the Douglas County Commission's meeting on Wednesday, May 1, 2024.

Nearly five hours into Wednesday’s Douglas County Commission meeting, county leaders weren’t near a decision on whether to approve a revised set of regulations for wind energy projects in the county.

The revised regulations — which call for substantially more rigorous application requirements and setback standards than the existing rules adopted in 2016 — were the only item on the meeting agenda. But on Wednesday night, much of the meeting had been taken up by more than three hours of public comments from dozens of community members.

One commenter told commissioners he thought the regulations were incomplete and had been rushed, and another suggested that each individual wind turbine for a project should be required to go through its own conditional use permit process.

Most of those commenters said they didn’t want commissioners to approve the rules because they’re against commercial-scale projects. As the Journal-World has reported, renewable energy giant NextEra Energy Resources has for a number of years been exploring whether it would be viable to bring a wind project of that scale to southwestern Douglas County.

All but four pages of the nearly 40-page wind rules are dedicated to standards for commercial-scale wind projects. One commenter said projects on this scale “will destroy the rural parts of Douglas County.”

Some of those commenters said they did agree with parts of the revised rules, such as a 2,500-foot minimum setback distance from the property lines of property owners who aren’t participating in a wind project, and were supportive of personal-scale projects, which are briefly defined in the regulations.

Some of the handful of people who spoke in favor of the regulations, meanwhile, voiced concern that the 2,500-foot setback requirement would effectively amount to a ban on wind energy in the county. Prior to earning approval from the Lawrence-Douglas County Planning Commission in January, the minimum setback distance from the property lines of nonparticipating property owners was 1,500 feet.

A few commenters also called on Commission Chair Karen Willey to recuse herself from voting on the wind regulations, claiming that she had a potential conflict of interest based on her interactions with NextEra. One commenter claimed she’d taken a trip to Washington, D.C., with the company.

The Journal-World learned of a potential conflict — specifically, that she may have been approached by the company about signing a contract to host wind turbines on her property — in mid-April and reached out to Willey to ask whether she’d considered signing any sort of contract with NextEra.

Willey told the Journal-World via email she and her husband had been approached by NextEra three times, with the first instance taking place nine years ago. They were approached again in 2022, which Willey said was probably at the “tail end” of her time serving on the Planning Commission and prior to when any version of the revised wind regulations came before the group.

She said the third time NextEra approached them, to ask about hosting a solar unit near their pond, possibly occurred in May 2022 while Willey was not a member of the Planning Commission and “had no intention” of serving on the County Commission. A few months later, Willey was selected by the Douglas County Democratic Party to finish the term of outgoing county commissioner Shannon Portillo, who left the seat for a job at Arizona State University.

In all three instances, Willey said she and her husband turned down NextEra, and she said she does not and has never had a contract with NextEra of any kind.

“I tend to share freely and likely talked about any and all of this (in) public record, mainly to show that any discussion of wind will impact my neighborhood directly and that I take it very seriously,” Willey told the Journal-World in a follow-up message. “There was no specific requirement to share since there was never a conflict with any agenda item.”

The public comment portion of the meeting ended around 10:15 p.m.