The Carlisle and Seward Planning Boards are promising to work together in negotiating the 20-megawatt Rock District Solar project proposed on 300 acres along Brown Road.
Eighty percent of the project is in Carlisle, 20 percent is in Seward, said Carlisle Supervisor John Leavitt.
Both pieces are necessary for the Cypress Creek project to fly, he said.
While Carlisle’s piece will house the bulk of the solar panels, Seward’s abuts the National Grid Transmission line and will have panels as well.
The project first surfaced about three years ago. At that time, construction was projected to begin in 2020.
Unlike the 50-megawatt NextEra Energy solar project in the Town of Sharon, approved by the Public Service Commission’s Siting Board in January, it’s subject to local review and approval.
Mr. Leavitt wants to make sure it stays that way.
One of the reasons he brought the two Planning Boards together Tuesday was to make it clear they’re working together.
“I was afraid that if we didn’t, and didn’t decide which one of us was going to be the lead agency on this, they could go to the state and say we were dragging our feet and ask the Siting Board to take over,” Mr. Leavitt said afterwards.
Mr. Leavitt proposed making the Carlisle Planning Board the lead agency for the project—“There would never be a meeting without your full knowledge,” he promised--and Seward’s reps agreed: “We need to get side-by-side on this,” said Seward Planning Board chair Chad Kniskern.
Mr. Leavitt said Cypress Creek, which is based in California, is in the process of completing its application for the project and filing its application fee.
No review will begin until that’s done, he said—though he expects it could be any day.
“I want this to be a very cooperative project between two towns,” he stressed.
“We need a united front so they don’t try to divide us.”
Project PILOTs will inevitably be a part of the discussion, Mr. Leavitt said, and Cypress Creek made it clear in previous meetings that they’re going to wait to see if the state or NYSERDA changes—lowers—its “suggested” PILOT of $2,500 per-megawatt before moving ahead.
“They said they’d be foolish to commit without knowing what the state is doing,” he said, “and you can’t blame them.”
But at the same time “they didn’t throw up their hands and walk away,” when they heard the Schoharie County IDA is considering a request from the Board of Supervisors to set a $20,000 per-megawatt PILOT minimum—something the IDA is expected to vote on today, Wednesday.
Both Carlisle and Seward have solar laws and they’re fairly similar, Mr. Leavitt said.
“It was good to do this, even if there’s no application yet,” Mr. Kniskern said at the end of Tuesday’s meeting. “We’ve gotten some lines of communication opened up and I think we can work well together.”