IMPORTANT: This issue affects everyone in the state of Iowa, and everyone needs to read this article. It looks like this site won’t be shutting down as soon as we thought it would. Just when we thought we were safe and we had won our nearly two year long battle (99% of which the community citizens paid for out of their own pockets) to get reasonable protections for non-participating landowners against encroachment of wind turbines on their land, these people are at it again, this time attacking us at the state level. Iowa Senate Bill SF 376, “A bill for an act relating to the siting and operation of renewable electric power generating facilities,” introduced to the committee on February 19, would strip away ALL local control from communities everywhere in the state to regulate siting and operation of wind turbines within their counties!
Among the prohibitions in this bill?
• Communities may NOT deny a commercial wind energy company a permit to build wind farms within their county.
• Counties may NOT limit the number of wind turbines that a company can construct. You could literally have 300 wind turbines surrounding your house on all sides. (Just look at Adair County, which currently has no fewer than 532 wind turbines!)
• Counties may NOT use CSR (Corn Suitability Rating) as a criteria to determine where wind farms can be constructed (a direct attack on the regulation we just passed in Buchanan County).
• Counties may NOT require a distance from a neighbor’s home of more than 3 times the height of the turbine (even though detached blades can fly MUCH farther than this).
• Counties may NOT require a distance of more than 1 and 1/10th the height of the turbine from a neighbor’s property line.
Make no mistake, Senate Bill SF 376 was not written by the Senate, but by wind energy companies for THEIR benefit and to line THEIR pockets. As I have demonstrated with proven statistics in many previous articles on this site, wind turbines do NOT create jobs, and they do NOT lower electricity rates. In fact, the opposite is true. Electricity rates invariably go up to pay for the cost of these projects. These companies don’t even care about the land owners who sign leases with them!
This is no longer a battle that only affects a few counties in Iowa. It has escalated into total war that affects everyone who lives in Iowa. Furthermore, it is a DIRECT, BLATANT and downright UNETHICAL assault on Iowa Code 352.1 that specifically gives local control to communities to regulate business, land use, and energy production in their counties. In fact, Iowa Code 352.1 specifically states:
“It is the intent of the general assembly to provide local citizens and local governments
the means by which agricultural land may be protected from nonagricultural development
pressures.“
What you need to do:
• Carpet bomb your local representatives and senators. Tell them to vote NO on SF 376.
• Write to President Donald Trump and ask him to immediately issue an executive order that revokes all federal subsidies on wind turbines / renewable energy projects.
Make no mistake people, we are now in an all out war to protect our way of life and to keep big government and big corporate interests out of controlling how we choose to use land in our local counties. And it affects everyone who lives in Iowa.
