The recent approval of the Tallgrass Development LLC solar farm is a profound moral and regulatory failure.
For four years, a small handful of landowners worked in secret to secure corporate leases, looking their neighbors in the eye and lying to people they called friends.
They prioritized personal profit over the well-being of the community and chose a payout over decades of friendship, but the betrayal doesn't end there. It has now escalated to outright bullying.
The leasing landowners recently hired an attorney who threatened me with a lawsuit in a cowardly attempt to silence any opposition. Using legal pressure to intimidate your neighbors is an admission that your position cannot withstand honest scrutiny.
This project isn't being built on "green energy." It is being built on a foundation of deception and a ruthless "profit at any cost" mentality.
To add insult to injury, the leasing landowners live miles away, comfortably insulated from the project’s impact, while neighbors and former friends are forced to live with the adverse consequences of their naked greed.
Unfortunately, rather than carefully and systematically reviewing the implications of a massive solar conversion facility, the Ellis County Planning and Zoning Committee facilitated this unscrupulous behavior.
The developers plotted for four years, but the public was given a mere 20 days’ notice before zoning approval. This window, conveniently spanning holiday closings, was clearly designed to stifle dissent and speed the project to approval.
Even more alarming is that the committee moved this project forward with a list of conditions that weren't even finalized or made public.
I spent the morning after the meeting searching for specific requirements, only to find many are still being "decided."
How can our officials recommend a 35-year conditional-use permit when significant details of the project are still a mystery?
Perhaps the worst of failures (almost too many to count) is the lack of basic due diligence regarding our natural resources.
To approve three decades of industrial construction and operation without securing a water source is the height of irresponsibility.
By approving this project, the Zoning and Planning Committee has effectively signed a blank check to a corporation and left the community to deal with the social, environmental and financial fallout.
We deserve better than a government that rewards secrecy and intimidation, while ignoring basic due diligence.
We deserve a government that protects its residents from corporate-funded bullying and demands transparency before the project has been approved, not after the damage is done
— Keith Pfannenstiel,
Mt. Pleasant Road, Hays