Minutes 05-27-2014 - Laserfiche WebLink

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use...will be in harmony with the area in which it is to be located," and that"the use will maintain or enhance the value of contiguous property..." (UDO 5.3.2(c),(b). [my emphasis] The proposed project does not satisfy either of these conditions. We bought our house because we wanted to live in the Rural Buffer. As we understood it, the Rural Buffer was conceived to preserve so far as possible the rural character of Orange County by erecting a barrier against suburban sprawl; a phrase one heard consistently at the time was "open space." Today we see seven or eight acres of ineadow from our north windows and porch. Were this project to be approved, we will see, given the rising topography of the land, a solid wall of solar panels whose metal frames, rising well above the top of the eight foot fence at the edge of the property, will glint and glare in our direction all day long. Only two decades or more of tree growth--roughly the useful life of the solar project--might conceivably insulate us. That the project is so close to a residential neighborhood raises a host of troubling new concerns for all of us on Cascade Drive. Among these are reflection from the panel frames; the audible buzz of the inverters and the whirr of the transformer; the microclimatological effect of a twenty-acres surface operating at 120 degrees; grass and brush fires; hail, hurricane, or tornado damage; animal incursion; and the potential for leaching or leaking of hazardous materials and the possible contamination of our wells and New Hope Creek. Here then is an unforeseen and unprecedented problem for Orange County: the site proposed is immediately adjacent to a residential neighborhood more than half a century old. As far as we know two large-scale solar utilities have so far been approved in Orange County; neither is situated next door to a residential neighborhood. And none should be. Our ordinances must be rewritten to guarantee it. No other public utility as far as I know has so large a footprint as this one. No other permitted use so dominates the landscape as a solar array on this scale. Nothing that I can think of even remotely resembles it--unless you can imagine a twenty-acre mini-storage facility. No other public structure that I can imagine, other than a penitentiary, requires thousands of feet of chain-link fence nor hundreds of plantings to secure the perimeter and block the view. The point is that while a solar installation may be technically a "public utility," it is not, on this scale, compatible either with a residential neighborhood or with the Rural Buffer, if"Rural Buffer" means anything. However high the fence or dense the plantings, this facility with its 18,000 panels over twenty acres will permanently transform one of the most tranquil and bucolic residential neighborhoods in Orange County into what amounts to an industrial zone. Solar installations are a comparatively new phenomenon. There is nothing yet really comparable to a twenty-acre solar installation built cheek-by-jowl next to a preexisting residential neighborhood. For this reason we believe Sunlight Partners has not shown and cannot show that their project will "maintain," let alone "enhance," our property values. On the contrary, we all know it to be the case that the value of our homes and our property will be markedly reduced and the appreciation on our investment largely or wholly lost. The developers, Sunlight Partners in Mesa, Arizona, have targeted North Carolina to take advantage of tax credits, a renewable energy requirement, and favorable zoning regulations; by March 2013 they had applied for nineteen new projects in the state. (http://www.biziournals.com/charlotte/print-edition/2013/03/29/solar-industry-sees-briqht-future-