Klickitat County, WA’s first ever energy overlay zone was led by Dana Peck the head of the ED Department in the county. This county of only 19,855 is almost twice the size of the state of Rhode Island with 1872 square miles.
Peck came out west in the 1980s as a wind power developer but the industry dried up in the early 1990s. He moved from the private sector into the public sector and saw the confusion that reigned during the boom/bust periods of energy cycles. He told me, “We had energy developers all over the place in the last boom and I wanted to be prepared before this next one took place.”
He convinced his board to finance the $500,000 in studies that could help determine where it made the most sense for energy farms. “We decided that about 2/3 of the county was suitable for either wind or solar. We got these areas designated as ‘allowed use’ from a planning standpoint.”
By doing all of this pre-work and studies (including a $90,000 avian study) it will help developers to get projects approved in a much quicker time period. “It becomes strictly an administrative decision and only takes about 3 weeks to get thru the permitting process compared to 6 to 12 months or more under normal circumstances. The burden of proof to fight these energy projects falls from the developer to the challenger. We got all of the public input out of the way up front, making these decisions much less confrontational.”
And the return from this forward thinking county’s decision to pre-plan? “The first year of property tax receipts from the initial project will return the entire $500,000 investment.” That is a 100% payback on a 20 to 30 year investment!
Smart, long range thinking on the part of this rural county and its director of ED, Dan Peck!
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