Manlius — Members of the Manlius Town Board recently agreed to continue working on a draft of a local law that would regulate industrial solar array farms in the town, after already going through the process of drafting the law and holding a public hearing that spanned two board meetings.
At the Feb. 10 meeting of the board, Town Attorney Tim Frateschi said the Onondaga County Planning Board suggested that the town look to the Central New York Regional Planning and Development Board (CNY RPDB) to see what it would recommend. Frateschi said the CNY RPDB sent him solar panel regulations they were in the process of drafting into law. This document includes regulations on commercial, industrial and residential solar panel configurations.
The originally drafted local law was written after an interest from the SunEdison company, in October 2015, to build two 12-acre, 2-megawatt solar array farms on privately owned land along Route 290 (Green Lakes Road), but no applications to the town have been submitted.
The original draft from the town of Manlius was already put to a public hearing on Jan. 13, but the board felt they needed more time to refine the document and more opportunities for community feedback.
Frateschi advised the board to merge the town’s draft of the regulations with that from the CNY RPDB so it would include regulations for residential and commercial solar panel use, in addition to industrial, which is what the town’s document focused on.
“The reason I didn’t include commercial and residential solar panel rules in this draft was that we thought we had a company with interest to build the solar farm, but since the company [SunEdison] hasn’t moved forward with this, I don’t really see the need to get these industrial regulations done first,” said Councilor Richard Rossetti, who drafted the original regulations.
continued — Town Supervisor Ed Theobald said he would like to see a committee of people with expertise in this subject area get together to make recommendations for the next draft of the solar array regulations. The board voted to close the public hearing on Feb. 10, but did not take any actions for the current drafted regulations as they plan to merge that document with the document from the CNY RPDB and will have to do the public hearing process all over again before it can be voted on.
Some main points from the original drafted resolution include:
•A solar array farm must be located in a Residential-Agriculture (RA) parcel of land exceeding 20 acres and no more than one solar energy conversion system per five acres.
•Any such solar farm must gain a special permit approval from the town board and is subject to site plan approval by the planning board.
•The solar panel arrays should not exceed a height of 15 feet and must be completely enclosed by a security fence no less than eight feet.
•The applicant for the solar farm must submit a letter of intent to the town committing the owner to notify the building inspector 30 days before the discontinuance of the solar farm in the case of decommissioning.
•No solar farm may be built within three miles of an existing solar farm.
•Monitoring and maintenance for the solar farm is the responsibility of the owner/operator.
