Morgan County Zoning Board To Meet Tomorrow On Apex Application

By Benjamin Cox on August 25, 2020 at 5:09pm

The Morgan County Zoning Board of Appeals is meeting this week to go over findings in Apex Clean Energy’s Lincoln Land Wind Application.

Morgan County Planner Dusty Douglas gave specifics Monday about what the board will be looking at this week before they make a recommendation to the Morgan County Commissioners: “We are meeting at the courthouse Wednesday night in the courtroom at 5:30 with the board of appeals. It’s a follow up to the public hearing we had a couple of weeks ago. At the time, the board was not ready to follow through with any motions that were discussed, and they wanted to take some further guidance from our legal counsel to kind of spell out where he thinks we are with everything. We will hopefully get some feedback from that group and see where we go. Ultimately the goal is to get an advisory recommendation from them to bring back to the Morgan County Commissioners. We haven’t been able to get there yet, but I think we are inching closer.”

Douglas says he’s not heard much criticism from the community on the 41 findings made by Patrick Engineering since the last zoning board meeting: “It all has been good. Most folks who have taken a look, I think really feel like there wasn’t anything that wasn’t already in the [wind] ordinance. We set it up for those things. There are a couple things in the road usage agreement that we certainly won’t be able to address Wednesday night, but they will be a part of any conditions that are made. Beyond that, we are supposed to get some additional information from the developer that I knew there were going to be questions on, so hopefully that will alleviate some concerns of the Board of Appeals on Wednesday. I’m not sure that we will get there [to an agreement] 100%, but I do feel like we are making progress.”

The zoning board will meet in the main courtroom at the Morgan County Courthouse at 5:30PM Wednesday.