BEATRICE – A Nebraska State Senator wants to require counties to enact zoning regulations before authorizing wind energy projects.
Senator Tom Brewer introduced LB 424 Friday in the Government Committee he chairs. He says wind energy projects have torn the fabric of communities.

"It's something Lancaster County's dealing with...Gage County's dealing with...Saline County's dealing with...and that tear in the fabric of the community is caused by the fact that you have landowners that are next to where the towers are being built, that have no or limited ability to express their concerns about wind energy."

Two Gage County residents, Emily Haxby of Clatonia and Larry Allder of Cortland, support Brewer’s bill. Both have been staunch opponents of a potential wind farm in their area of the county. Haxby is a new member of the Gage County Board. She said LB 424 does not kill wind energy development, but provides for regulations on setbacks, turbine noise and decommissioning of wind projects.

"There is no place in this bill of proposed changes that tells a county what those regulations must be set at....just that they must have them in place. This provides the county and its constituents ample time to discuss and include significant public information efforts."

Allder was successful in getting Gage County to increase setback distance between wind turbines and rural homes.

"I lost some good friends over a wind project that was proposed for my area back in 2015. By the time the developer held their first informational meeting with our community about that project...they had already been in the area for two years, signing 30-year confidentiality contracts with my neighbors, for wind turbines. When I confronted my neighbors about the wind project, they were very defensive and their comments were not about green energy. They were about money."

Opposing Brewer’s bill was Omaha attorney David Levy on behalf of BHE Wind, a company that built the largest wind farm in Nebraska in Holt County. He said the bill is discriminatory.

"lB 424 discriminates against the wind energy industry, by singling it out for treatment that the legislature has not saw fit for any other industry in the over fifty years of county zoning authority in Nebraska. This legislature allowed counties to adopt zoning regulations in 1969. However, neither then nor since then has the legislature saw fit to require counties to have zoning. LB 424 would require them to do so...but only for one industry."

Levy said the bill runs contrary to zoning around the U.S., is anti-wind and anti-local control. Nebraska Farmers Union President John Hansen said the state did not take a similar approach when regulating livestock confinement facilities.

"This is an effort to force a set of planning and zoning requirements on counties who have already made the decision not to do planning and zoning in their counties."

A former Nebraska Energy Director noted that Nebraska is one of the highest wind capacity states, but lags well behind Iowa and Kansas in wind development.