photo by: Chad Lawhorn/Journal-World

Evergy's coal-fired power plant sits just on the other side of the river from the proposed Kansas Sky Energy site. In the foreground an irrigation system waters a sod farm field that has not yet sprouted in this April 2024 file photo.

It wouldn’t quite be accurate to say that Douglas County has a fully formed plan for battling climate change.

But, the county does now have a plan for creating such a plan.

Commissioners at their Wednesday meeting unanimously approved Adapt Douglas County, which includes 14 broad goals that range from producing more green energy to reducing how much county residents drive in a year.

“This will be our guiding document, our North Star, maybe for the next 25 years,” Kim Criner Ritchie, sustainability manager for the county, told the Journal-World in a brief interview.

But the document doesn’t produce a list of concrete initiatives that the county will need to undertake to meet the near-term goal of reducing the county’s greenhouse gas emissions by 60% by 2030. However, the document does provide a glimpse at what such a list of initiatives might look like.

The document provided a hypothetical “emissions reduction scenario” for 2030. That scenario involved:

• 5% of existing housing units and commercial buildings being retrofitted in ways to improve their energy efficiency by 20%;

• 100% of all new construction being built to the latest energy building codes;

• 20% of the county’s rooftop solar potential being activated.

• a 16% increase in electric vehicle adoption.

The scenario also highlights how tough the 60% reduction goal will be to meet. If the county were to accomplish everything on the hypothetical scenario by 2030 it would result in a slightly less than 40% reduction in local greenhouse gas emissions.

But as Ritchie reminded commissioners, Douglas County is “not on track” to meet any of those hypothetical scenarios. Ritchie, though, said the hypothetical scenario does serve as a good model for the type of list that the county could create in the future.

For example, Ritchie said it is very likely that some sort of home weatherization program will be part of the county’s future efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But Ritchie said it was still too early to estimate when the county could create an actual list of initiatives that would be needed for the county to meet its emission goals. She said, first, the county likely will have to try some programs, see some results and then plug those early results into the computer model to create a realistic list of what initiatives will be needed to achieve a 60% reduction in emissions.

County commissioners said they were understanding of that approach.

“This doesn’t prescribe all the answers, but it gives us the framework to really pull those conversations together and talk about them in the community,” County Commission Chair Karen Willey said.

Those future discussions are where the county likely will make specific policy decisions that could result in changes to county regulations or codes. Commissioner Patrick Kelly stressed a couple of times during Wednesday’s meeting that adoption of the Adapt Douglas County plan doesn’t change any county policies or codes.

The plan, though, does list a series of policy goals that are likely to guide county staff members and others as they make future recommendations. Those policy goals include: Reduce energy consumption while increasing access to renewable energy; enable access to low carbon modes of transportation, such as electric vehicles; protect the county’s water resources; use local ecosystems to sequester carbon; work with local emergency management officials and others to prepare the community for climate change and “address the psychological impacts of climate change and stress on our community.”

In other business, county commissioners unanimously approved a set of technical findings and required conditions for the Kansas Sky Energy Center project, a massive utility-scale solar farm planned for northern Douglas County.

However, the process did require some corrections before commissioners could approve the resolution that included the exact conditions that the project must meet before receiving its final permit. Those conditions — which involve everything from when construction activity can occur during the course of a day to how vegetation on the site will be planted and cared for — included a significant error related to the stormwater requirements of the project.

Stormwater management for the project has been cited as a concern by neighbors and is listed as a point of violation in a lawsuit that Grant Township and about 20 residents have filed against the county in relation to the solar project.

At an April 13 public meeting where the solar project received a public hearing, county commissioners said the solar project would be subject to a stormwater condition that would require all stormwater detention basins to be designed “to control rates of runoff to predeveloped conditions.” That phrase was meant to ensure that the solar project would not produce any more stormwater runoff onto neighbors’ properties than what the farm fields currently produce.

However, late Tuesday afternoon, the Journal-World discovered that the proposed stormwater condition up for approval at Wednesday’s County Commission meeting had omitted the phrase requiring predevelopment conditions to be maintained, which would have opened the possibility that the solar project would be allowed to create new amounts of stormwater runoff for surrounding properties.

As of Tuesday evening, it was unclear why that phrase had been omitted, but on Wednesday morning county staff responded to the Journal-World that a clerical error had been made and that the resolution should have included the phrase. The county corrected the resolution after being made aware of it by the newspaper, and had it ready for the commission’s approval Wednesday evening.

One public commenter did ask the county for a more detailed explanation about how the error was made, but county commissioners and staff did not provide any explanation beyond it being a clerical error.