After five months mired in the day-to-day grind of a struggling presidential campaign, the El Paso massacre shook something loose in Beto O’Rourke.
After spending more than a week grieving with his fellow El Pasoans, O’Rourke emerged to recast his presidential bid with an expression of “what the fuck?” sentiment reminiscent of his Senate run. In a speech earlier this month, he declared that he was now running with the primary purpose of confronting Trump and his willful provocation of racial violence.
By making Trump’s racism, guns, and immigration the central focus of his presidential campaign and traveling to states that are usually ignored in the primaries, O’Rourke is leaving behind the conventional, inside-the-lines approach that has resulted in his consistent polling below 3 percent.
The spontaneous, just-do-what-feels-right shift—the kind that tends to give campaign operatives and donors the cold sweats—is a callback to the sort of anti-conformist political instincts that helped elevate him to the presidential race in the first place. But will this earnest crusade jumpstart his campaign?
PRESIDENT TRUMP’S Environmental Protection Agency moved Thursday to lift limits on potent greenhouse gas emissions from the drilling and transportation of natural gas, a major fuel source for electric power plants, heating systems and industrial processes. Not only would this be bad for the environment, but also it might well do more harm than good for the fossil-fuel industry.
The United States has enjoyed an energy revolution over the past decade as hydraulic fracturing and horizontal-drilling technologies unlocked huge amounts of domestically produced natural gas. The massive new supply of fuel has driven down gas prices and helped it displace coal, which is the worst environmental villain in the electricity sector. When natural gas is burned in power plants, it emits roughly half the heat-trapping carbon dioxide that burning coal produces and minuscule amounts of the noxious chemicals and particulates that sicken those living nearby.
But there is a very big catch. Natural gas is mostly methane. When allowed to waft into the atmosphere uncombusted, methane is an extremely potent greenhouse agent on its own. Though it lingers in the atmosphere for less time than carbon dioxide, methane is some 80 times more capable a heat-trapper over a 20-year time span. If one takes seriously expert warnings about avoiding dangerous near-term climate tipping points, after which temperatures could enter an upward spiral, restraining methane emissions is a key climate goal.
So when methane leaks from natural gas wells, storage tanks or pipelines, the fuel’s environmental impact suddenly looks much worse. Researchers, industry groups and federal standard-setters have debated how big a problem methane leakage is and how much it detracts from the appeal of natural gas as a bridge fuel between fossil fuels and renewables. But substantial recentresearch suggests that the country’s methane leakage rate has been much higher than the federal estimates that had made natural gas look like an environmental and economic miracle. Natural gas producers could argue that breakneck coal-to-gas switching had driven down official power-sector emissions estimates over the past decade. But it was becoming harder to accept that the environmental benefits were as pronounced.
That is why the industry should have welcomed President Barack Obama’s moves to require methane emissions control in natural gas production and transportation, rules that came into force in 2016. In fact, several major fossil-fuel players have embraced the regulations. For relatively inexpensive upgrades and procedures that enable natural gas producers to capture and sell more product, the rules allowed the industry to argue that methane leakage across the industry would be minimized and that natural gas could be, at least for a time, part of a serious climate strategy.
Yet others opposed the new rules. This is no surprise, given recent research on methane leakage, which found massive leaks from relatively few “superemitters” in the business. The regulations would have hit bad actors hardest; the bad actors did not like that. And the Trump administration just sided with them.
The EPA’s proposal would substantially weaken the Obama-era rules and keep natural gas’s reputation tarnished — all to save the industry a mere $17 million to $19 million a year. It is counterproductive in every conceivable sense.
Scott Fallon and Andrew Ford report for the North Jersey Record
Disease-carrying mosquitoes and ticks are an increased threat in New Jersey because they are living longer lives due to extended warm months and mild winters.
Some of the state’s largest and most popular lakes have been inundated by algae blooms this summer due to an exceptionally wet year and exceptionally warm July.
And fish that once swam in abundance off the coast of New Jersey have migrated north in search of cooler waters.
Climate change is no longer an abstract concept or future threat, scientists say. Its effects are being felt all over New Jersey, from Shore towns facing increased coastal flooding to Meadowlands communities that were ravaged by Superstorm Sandy and inland communities dealing with increased flash flooding from more intense rainfall.
“What we’re seeing lately is unprecedented in the magnitude of the changes and the speed at which they are occurring,” said David Robinson, a Rutgers University professor and the state climatologist, who has been analyzing New Jersey’s climate for decades. “It’s a global issue that has local ramifications, and in New Jersey that’s manifesting itself in rising temperatures and more abundant rainfall.”
Annual temperatures in New Jersey have increased approximately 3 degrees since the beginning of the 20th century. Climate models show two possible futures: one in which greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase (in red) and another in which greenhouse gas emissions increase at a slower rate (in green). (Photo: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)
The overwhelming majority of scientists, peer-reviewed studies, and government agencies have shown that the planet is warming due in large part to human activity, such as burning fossil fuels like coal, natural gas and gasoline, which has increased the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, preventing heat from escaping into space.
New Jersey is fast becoming ground zero for climate change. Sea level rise is happening so fast in the state that it’s double the global average, thanks in part to melting glaciers and the expansion of warmer water along with a gradually sinking coastal landmass.
Atlantic City | Aug 19, 2019 — Over 240 offshore wind energy supporters attended Time for Turbines III at the Stockton University Atlantic City campus on Friday.
“We have the resources and capacity to be the national frontrunner in the offshore wind industry,” state Senate President Steve Sweeney (D-West Deptford) said at the event. “As the renewable energy sector of the economy grows, we have an obligation not only to our environment but to New Jersey workers to make it a priority.”
Jersey Renews, a coalition of labor, community and environmental organizations, and Maryland-based nonprofit the Business Network for Offshore Wind partnered for the event and what they called a day full of information-sharing and networking to support the development of a just and sustainable offshore wind industry in the state.
“Given the impacts and urgency of climate change that we are facing on the shoreline, it is inspiring to see all of the ways that state government and the offshore wind industry are working together to bring utility-scale clean energy to ratepayers as soon as possible,” said Liz Burdock, executive director, Business Network for Offshore Wind.
Gov. Phil Murphy announced his signing of Executive Order No. 79 establishing the New Jersey WIND Institute from a video recording at the event before offshore wind developers, state officials, labor leaders and environmentalists delivered presentations on the industry’s progress in the last year and future developments.
“The broad coalition of stakeholders here today from New Jersey’s business, labor and environmental communities underscores the importance of the offshore wind industry to our state,” U.S. Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) said.
State Board of Public Utilities President Joseph Fiordaliso spoke about the BPU’s Energy Master Plan and Offshore Wind Strategic Plan as ongoing projects.
“As the serious impacts of the climate crisis are arriving much more quickly than anticipated, it is imperative to do all we can to mitigate those effects,” he said.
“New Jersey is poised to become the nation’s leader in offshore wind generation,” BPU Commissioner Bob Gordon said. “Not only will the state reap the benefits of clean, reliable and renewable power, but we will create a whole new industry that will produce thousands of high-skilled jobs, rebuild our manufacturing sector and revitalize our ports.”
Another top panel at the event consisted of the offshore wind developers, including Denmark-based Ørsted, Atlantic City-based offshore wind firm Atlantic Shores Offshore Wind and Norway-based energy company Equinor.
“The economic benefits and supply chain opportunities that come as part of this new industry will have long-lasting effects throughout the region and the country,” said Lauren Burm, head of public affairs and communications, Ørsted North America.
A green transportation panel in the afternoon, chaired by Doug O’Malley, director of Environment New Jersey, talked again about the state’s potential in the offshore wind industry.
“New Jersey has a clean energy gold mine of offshore wind right off the Jersey Shore, and we are on the cusp of tapping this renewable energy to power our state and region,” O’Malley said.
The event also received major organizational support from Environment New Jersey, the New Jersey Work Environment Council, Stockton University and the Energy Foundation.
Norway-based Fred.Olsen Windcarrier provided its construction vessel Brave Turn to build the Block Island Wind Farm alongside Montco Offshore liftboats. Deepwater Wind photo
Off the New Jersey coast, the bright red hull of the Fugro Enterprise has become a familiar sight to commercial fishermen who pull shellfish dredges and tend gillnets.
Plodding along at around 4 knots, the 170’x40’x11′ survey vessel is making detailed geotechnical surveys for the Ocean Wind energy project, planned by Ørsted to accommodate towering wind turbines that would supply New Jersey with its first 1,100 megawatts of renewable energy generated by offshore wind.
The CTV Atlantic Pioneer has serviced the Block Island Wind Farm since spring 2016. Blount Boats photo
To New Jersey’s renewable power advocates and Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy, the work is a welcome sight. It’s the first step toward building what they hope will be 3,500 MW of offshore power by 2030.
For people in the state’s seafood industry — including the long-established and profitable scallop and surf clam fleets — the big red boat portends a new struggle to stay in business.
“The impact to New Jersey will be devastating if the commercial fishing industry is displaced at all,” warned Brick Wenzel, a captain who fishes out of Point Pleasant Beach, N.J., as state utility regulators prepared measure so Ørsted and other companies could bid for power contracts.
The U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) and Coast Guard have put wind developers on notice that they will need to plan for wide, safe vessel traffic lanes through future turbine arrays.
But that’s just one challenge ahead for an industry, born in the waters of northern Europe that now looks to develop potentially the richest wind energy market in the world.
In U.S. waters, offshore wind developers face hurdles of finding enough heavy-lift construction vessels, and even physical space in U.S. ports to accommodate the coming generation of giant wind turbines.
LOTS OF WIND, RIGHT SPOT
The East Coast between southern New England and the Carolinas is so attractive for offshore energy development because it has consistent year-round wind close to “load centers” — Boston, New York and other cities of the eastern megapolis, said James Bennett, who heads BOEM’s renewable energy program.
The pioneer was Deepwater Wind (now part of Ørsted) with its five-turbine, 30-MW Block Island Wind Farm of Rhode Island that went online in 2016. The same year Equinor (then known as Statoil) won a 79,350-acre lease for its Empire Wind project, tucked between shipping lanes into New York Harbor.
Two years later companies bid almost double what Equinor spent per acre to secure three more leases south of Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., for $135 million each in December 2018.
“I think what you’ll see with these leases in place is tremendous acceleration down to Virginia,” said Bennett.
An offshore wind turbine under construction. Siemens photo
With that market signal, U.S. shipbuilders and other would-be suppliers have been stepping up with their offerings. Two major trade shows, the International Partnering Forum 2019 presented by the Business Network forOffshore Wind in New York City in April, and the U.S. Offshore Wind conference in Boston in June, both counted packed houses with around 1,400 attendees each.
In May Ørsted and partner WindServe Marine LLC, an affiliate of New York-based Reinauer Group, announced plans to build a pair of crew transfer vessels (CTVs). The BMT Group-designed catamarans will be the second and third U.S.-flag CTVs since Blount Boats, Warren, R.I., built the CTV Atlantic Pioneer to service the Block Island turbines.
While the trash incineration industry is seizing this moment to try and sell municipalities their rebranded forms of yesterday’s technologies, there is an opportunity to embrace a better approach, Mandy Gunasekara says.
By Mandy Gunasekara, Star-Ledger guest columnist
The New Jersey legislature recently passed a food-waste recycling bill designed to better align the state’s waste-management processes with today’s understandings and societal expectations.
Legislators no doubt had the best of intentions while crafting this bill – which is on its way to the governor for signature into law – but it has a glaring loophole that stands to undermine its entire purpose. A last-minute amendment added trash incinerators to the list of approved recycling facilities. If burning New Jersey’s food waste strikes you as a major step backward in local waste management and counter to the basic meaning of recycling, then you are on the right track.
Reading through the text of the amendment it would be hard to find this provision given incinerators are rarely mentioned by their old, honest name, but instead have a new, more enlightened one – “resource recovery facilities.” While effective PR campaigns and lobbying efforts have changed the look and feel of these trash burning facilities on paper, little has changed in terms of the technology.
Throwing food away — or just burning it — counts as recycling in bill awaiting Murphy’s approval
A last-minute change to a bill originally meant to expand composting in the Garden State could instead send food waste to landfills and incinerators.
Some facilities have added heat capturing capabilities in an effort to produce energy. The PR brigade refers to these as “waste-to-energy,” which sounds great, but this has proved both inefficient and extremely costly in practice. It actually costs $8.33 per megawatt-hour to make energy out of waste incineration. For comparison, pulverized coal only costs $4.25 per megawatt-hour; nuclear energy costs $2.04.
From an environmental perspective, burning trash is equally problematic. Air pollutants are an inevitable biproduct of the process, but there is a more recent concern that incinerators are also releasing Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances more commonly referred to as PFAS. These chemicals have been the subject of growing public concern, which prompted EPA to issue an action plan to address it. In the meantime, trash incinerators do not have the same level of pollution control capabilities for PFAS as they do other air pollutants.
On top of colony collapse, beekeepers are now facing unprecedented losses from extreme weather
Bees on a honeycomb this week in La Bollene-Vesubie, France. (Eric Gallard/Reuters)By Laura ReileyJuly 5
Laura Reily reports for the Washington Post
Commercial honeybee colonies have had a rough run. And it’s not over yet. The annual loss rate for honeybees during the year ending in April rose to 40.7 percent, up slightly over the annual average of 38.7 percent, according to the Bee Informed Partnership, a nonprofit group associated with the University of Maryland.
More troubling was this past winter’s losses of 37.7 percent. Winter bees tend to live longer, clustering in the hive to keep the queen warm. This winter’s losses were 8.9 percentage points higher than the survey average and the highest winter loss since the annual bee survey began 13 years ago.
Karen Rennich, the partnership’s executive director, said the nonprofit has been collecting loss data from beekeepers and conducting a longer survey of management data since 2010. “We’re trying to drill down and see which management practices are correlated with lower mortality,” she said.
Rennich points to the three months of California wildfires, with bees affected by smoke and by the lack of plants on which to forage. She also cited the wet winter in the Midwest and the spring’s slow planting schedule. But drought, fires, hurricanes and the Midwest’s “bomb cyclone” are just the start of bee woes.
The honeybee crisis of the past decade is often blamed on the increased use of fungicides, herbicides such as Monsanto’s Roundup and pesticides called neonicotinoids. In addition to colony collapse disorder, in recent years bees have suffered from viruses carried by varroa mites, as well as problems with queen vigor, weakened immune systems and poor nutrition. Longtime beekeepers such as David Hackenberg say the bee life span has fallen to just 25 to 30 days. It used to be more than twice that.
A bee outside Moscow last month. (Yuri Kadobnov/AFP/Getty Images)
When people think of bees, they think of honey. But since the early 1990s, many beekeepers have made the majority of their money renting out their hives to farmers to pollinate crops such as apples, cranberries, melons and squash. (Row crops such as corn, wheat and soybeans are wind-pollinated or self-pollinating.)
Hackenberg winters his bees in Trilby, Fla., then he starts his year by pollinating California almonds. (It takes nearly 2 million hives to pollinate California’s almond crop alone, with nearly half the country’s hired-gun pollinator bees trucked in from all over.) After that he heads to Georgia to pollinate peaches, then to Pennsylvania, then to Maine for blueberries and New York for clover honey, before finishing up by pollinating pumpkins back in Pennsylvania. He trucks his bees 80,000 to 100,000 miles each year, moving them up to 22 times.
Hackenberg coined the term “colony collapse disorder” in 2006.
“In 2017 we had 1,671 hives and our losses for the year were 1,458 hives. Last year we had 1,832 hives and lost 2,093 hives,” Hackenberg said this week by phone. And while losing more than 100 percent seems like a mathematical impossibility, he explained: “All we’re doing is making replacement bees to make up for our losses. I’ve been talking to the big guys across the country who had 20,000 hives and they didn’t have 1,000 hives to go to [California’s] almonds. It’s not nice to say, but the almond farmers were renting a lot of empty boxes.”
Anyone who has traveled in or through New Jersey heading “down the shore” from the north almost certainly has traversed the Driscoll Bridge in Sayreville and no doubt has been witness to the 418 acres of brownfield that sits on its southern end.
The environmental remediation site is the former National Lead Industries property, previously being marketed as “The Pointe” by O’Neill Properties Group out of Philadelphia. O’Neill had obtained initial approvals from state and local authorities in 2014, including financial support from the New Jersey Economic Development Authority (NJEDA) through the Economic Redevelopment and Growth Program. Based on a lack of progress toward development of the enclosed regional mall that was the centerpiece of The Pointe, in 2017 North American Properties was engaged by the designated redeveloper, Sayreville Seaport Associates, to create an updated master plan and position the property for a development start. North American Properties hired Cooper Robertson Partner John Kirk, one of the country’s leading urban designers (and a Maplewood resident), to lead the master planning efforts for Riverton.
North American Properties, a multi-regional real estate development company, took over development of the location hoping to turn it into the largest mixed-use project in the state. NAP announced plans to build a mixed-use, village-style development dubbed “Riverton.”
Together, Cooper Robertson and North American Properties worked to create the Riverton vision and craft a master plan, a new waterfront development along two miles of shoreline in Middlesex County along the Raritan River, and less than 20 miles away from Manhattan.
Riverton is a 400+ acre development along two uninterrupted miles of the Raritan River coastline. – NORTH AMERICAN PROPERTIES
North American Properties says the future development project should be thought of as “America’s next great hometown.” It will be a metropolis-meets-mega-town square with spectacular river views, and is expected to bring more housing, retail and entertainment space, along with hotels, offices and other commercial uses, to a Middlesex County town that hasn’t experienced a revitalization.
The $2.5 billion mixed-use development is expected to create a fully walkable city layout with over 2 million square feet of retail and an infusion of restaurants, 2,000 residential units, Class-A office space, hotels, parks, and a 200-slip marina. Additionally, planned civic services include a fire station, performing arts spaces and a public walkway along the entire riverfront. It will become a place to experience the best of New Jersey. Where land meets water; where small-town quaint meets shore-town casual.
The Riverton peninsula has ready access to and from major vehicular arteries like the Garden State Parkway, U.S. Route 9, and State Route 35, with more than 372,500 vehicles per day travelling past the site. Riverton is positioned to be a beating heart of the area. Mark Toro, NAP’s managing partner, called it an access nirvana with the three major highways all feeding into the pipeline of the site. Additionally, public transportation hubs are within a short drive that connects the community to New York and Philadelphia as well as Boston and Washington, D.C. A ferry terminal in South Amboy is also on the way, just a few miles east of Riverton, which will provide boat service to Lower Manhattan and the Financial District.
Riverton will be a connection point to unite the best of New Jersey whether you arrive by boat or car, bike or bus. – NORTH AMERICAN PROPERTIES
Once completed, Riverton will be the largest mixed-use development in New Jersey’s history.
The contaminated National Lead Industries property sat dormant for decades. Redeveloper Sayreville Seaport Associates spent years remediating the land, starting in 2009. And NAP says the ground has been moving on the site and the first of the retail stores should be a reality within the next two years. Many approvals are still required from state and local agencies, but the first phases of construction are scheduled to begin in spring 2020, with Bass Pro Shop being one of the first planned openings in 2021.
Toro, a New Jersey native and Rutgers University graduate who is now based in Atlanta, said: “We create great, walkable places that connect people to each other; cities to their souls … and individuals to experiences that move them.” Toro said the area is going to be a dwelling place with plenty of experiences for people to come and stay, be entertained and have fun.
The existing bulkhead, which was used for industrial barge deliveries, is to become the place where Riverton’s guests can connect most directly to the river, and an important public gathering spot in the mixed-use village, which is scheduled to open in 2022, with a combination of 460 luxury apartments and 81,000 square feet of creative and collaborative office space over retail and restaurants. A full-service hotel and conference center, Class-A office tower and waterfront townhomes will soon follow.
Riverton will be a new waterfront development in Sayreville in Middlesex County. – NORTH AMERICAN PROPERTIES
Riverton will be designed for a variety of age groups and will offer housing at a variety of price points. The rental rates will be competitive with the newest highly amenitized apartment homes in desirable locations in Middlesex and Monmouth counties.
Riverton is poised to provide an opportunity to serve the New York/New Jersey market, which is home to 16 million people, providing the next generation of commercial real estate, which is “experiential mixed-use.” The size and scale of Riverton enables NAP the “freedom to curate and deploy a full array of uses that will serve to energize the property 18 hours a day,” Toro remarked in a recent interview.
What does this mean for Sayreville?
Riverton will energize the area economically by bringing in new retail, restaurant, office and hotel options. It should generate thousands of local jobs including construction jobs as the project is built, as well as retail and service positions once businesses open. It will also reinforce Sayreville as a destination by creating a new downtown for the way people live, work and play today.
The team at NAP apparently knows how to create dynamic mixed-use environments that become the community’s “third place” — an area to gather outside of home and work that fosters human connection and plays host to meaningful experiences in real life.
For Sayreville and the rest of New Jersey, Riverton will not disappoint.
NAP has proven in many of its other projects that it can capture and hold the human energy its environments create. The firm’s professionals combine the right mix of uses, layer in community gathering spaces, deliver resort-level hospitality and activate the public realm with events to create even more energy and driving value for all components.
Solar panel at Susquehanna University Robert Inglis photo for The Daily Item
Solar energy farms could soon sprout from farmland stretched beneath high voltage power lines across the Valley as renewable energy companies are pitching lease proposals to local property owners.
Supervisors in both East and West Chillisquaque townships worked jointly with respective planning commissions and a solar industry representative to create zoning ordinance amendments regulating ground-mounted solar farm systems to get ahead of the installation of such developments.
The amendments call for restrictions on glare, establishes minimum setbacks and stormwater requirements and sets requirements for decommissioning and removing solar systems.
“There were five (companies) that talked to me to lease my ground, but I wasn’t interested,” said Bob Pardoe, secretary of the West Chillisquaque Township Planning Commission.
Pardoe estimated 10 property owners in his township were seriously considering proposals.
A Massachusetts-based firm, Nexamp: Solar Energy Solutions, mailed exploratory letters to property owners in Union County offering an estimated $1,500 per acre annually. The letter said the firm typically seeks 5 to 25 acres.
Legislation signed by Gov. Tom Wolf in 2017 and implemented in 2018 by the Public Utility Commission closed the Keystone State’s borders on solar tax credits.
The move raises the value of such credits, in part, by restricting participation in the state’s renewable energy tax credit program to systems built in Pennsylvania. In the past, Pennsylvania was an open border state and credits could be used from systems in 13 surrounding states and the District of Columbia, according to the PennFuture Energy Center.
Bid prices on such credits were at $35 Thursday compared to $22 on the same date in 2017, according to online market site SREC Trade.
Keith Hevenor, Nexamp communication manager, said this change and other bills pending in the state legislature make Pennsylvania a favorable place to build solar energy farms.
“The legislation has to be in place to be able to turn the energy we are generating into credits that can be monetized,” Hevenor said.
Nexamp hasn’t finalized developments in the Valley, but is currently pursuing agreements in the PPL Electric service area, including the greater Sunbury area, he said.
Free-standing solar farms
Solar panels can be found on rooftops throughout the Valley. What makes the proposed solar farms different is that they’re free-standing.
Hevenor said Nexamp’s systems don’t create large permanent environmental footprints. Concrete pads measuring about 100 square feet are poured for equipment that directs the energy from the panels to the power lines. The panels themselves are affixed to poles that are sunk into the ground without a concrete foundation. The wiring is above ground, he added.
Hevenor said the company establishes funds to remove the systems at no cost to the landowners when a lease ends or isn’t renewed. Leases last about 20 to 40 years on average, he added.
West Chillisquaque Township Supervisor Vaughn Murray said, in working to develop the ordinance amendment, the closest municipality with relative solar regulations was in Cumberland County.
The township has strict stormwater regulations, Murray said, and the farms as proposed are a unique fit.
“It’s not like you’re paving a parking lot. There’s still a chance for water to infiltrate the ground, but it’s not going to infiltrate the way it would in a field of corn,” Murray said.
Farm registration
Cindy Kahley administers the Agland Preservation program for Union County Conservation District. Registered farms are restricted from developing free-standing solar farms, she said. The program has about 8,000 acres of registered farmland. Farms not registered in the program must abide by municipal ordinance, she added.
Kahley said she’s aware of companies approaching landowners in Gregg, Buffalo and Kelly townships.
“A lot of the land I’ve seen that they have been approaching are prime and statewide soils, which are the best soils for farming,” Kahley said. “It would be a huge impact to take that land out of production, which has good prime soils, and have it sit there with free-standing panels.”
That’s not the case in West Chillisquaque Township in Northumberland County, according to Pardoe. The “majority” of land targeted there hasn’t been prime farmland, he said.
Shawn McLaughlin, Union County’s planning and economic development director, said solar farms are worth exploring, but that he’d rather it happen on rooftops or other developed sites.
“I’d prefer to see solar panels and arrays on those first rather than taking up our best farmland or best development sites,” McLaughlin said.
A public hearing on West Chillisquaque’s ordinance proposal will be held tonight followed by a joint meeting of the supervisors and planning commission members Tuesday morning to further discuss related issues.
