Dear Board of Commissioners:
The Michigan Constitution endows the county board with a pivotal role in public utility and local electric energy policy, as you well noted in your request to delay the Campbell closure. Thank you as well for how you exercised this role by requesting a public hearing on Consumers Energy’s Campbell wastewater plan.
In this vein, I would request the county board pass the following resolutions:
- To become a party in the Silver Maple Solar case in Zeeland Township, opposing the large industrial solar development which replaces valuable farmlands with an unreliable form of baseload electric generation in Michigan. The Michigan Court of Appeals’ recent decision regarding who must be notified as the Affected Local Unit (ALU) in a proposed industrial solar project gives Ottawa County an opportunity to step in and become a party in this case. The county has expertise in the very issues this project impacts—roads, drainage, water resources, agriculture, and long-term land use. This matters because Ottawa County is the third-largest agricultural producing county in Michigan by market value. The proposed project would take approximately 1,900 acres of productive farmland out of agricultural production for decades. Protecting one of our county’s greatest resources isn’t just a township issue—it’s a county issue.
- Join as a county board, just as many township boards in the county are already represented, the exploratory committee for a locally controlled electric cooperative. This is our best window of opportunity to pursue more local control of our electric grid, given the newly formed Office of Energy Dominance Financing under the Federal Department of Energy. To pursue this successfully, we need to display the same level of public support for this as was displayed in the request to delay the Campbell closure. A locally elected electric cooperative board for those parts of Ottawa County currently under Consumers Energy control would not preclude using Consumers Energy to help service our grid, but it would give us more local control of what Consumers Energy and other parties do, at a time our electric grid is under intense pressure given the push for Net Zero and data centers. At the end of the day, this effort really will amount to giving local voters the opportunity to decide whether they want to stay with the Consumers Energy status quo, or whether they want electricity policy under a locally elected electric cooperative board to ensure local interests are protected first and foremost.
History has been fully justifying your resolution to delay the closure of the Campbell, given the intense pressure on our grid of increasing electric usage. Instead of demolishing our fossil fuel plants, we need to be updating and improving them.
Thank you for your public service and your consideration of these requests.
Sincerely,
Joseph Parnell McCarter
Volunteer leader of SaveTheCampbell.com
Georgetown Township, MI