Hearing set on setback ordinance

Published 5:12 pm Friday, July 5, 2013

The Beaufort County Board of Commissioners chose Aug. 5 as the date for a public hearing regarding setbacks and other regulations concerning future energy-related projects in the county.

The Aug. 5 date is when the board has its next scheduled meeting.

A proposed ordinance requires a 75-foot setback from the right-of-way line on a road, a 50-foot setback from a property boundary line and 100-foot setback from a residence or business. It also includes a requirement for a vegetative buffer around an energy project, such as a solar farm, that reaches 6 feet in height within five years of the buffer being planted.

A three-man committee of the Beaufort County Board of Commissioners met last month to discuss the issue and develop the ordinance’s components. The committee — comprised of commissioners Gary Brinn, Ed Booth and Hood Richardson — instructed Bryant Buck, planning director for the Mid-East Commission, to draft the proposed ordinance.

If adopted, the proposed ordinance would not apply to existing solar farms or other energy projects.

The impetus for forming the committee surfaced earlier this year when Paul Woolard, who lives next to the solar-farm project at White Post, complained to commissioners about the project’s effects on his property.

After hearing Woolard’s complaints and discussing the matter, the board, with a unanimous vote, directed county staff to request the White Post solar-farm developers — SunEnergy 1 and Duke Energy Renewables — to find a new entrance to the project to prevent further damage to Woolard’s property.

At the meeting where Woolard aired his concerns, Brinn said he would like to have a county ordinance that would “guarantee that no property owner would every have to step out of their house and look at that.” Brinn called for a setback of at least 100 feet from the right of way.

“I’d like to have more, but I will take the 100 feet,” he said then.

 

About Mike Voss

Mike Voss is the contributing editor at the Washington Daily News. He has a daughter and four grandchildren. Except for nearly six years he worked at the Free Lance-Star in Fredericksburg, Va., in the early to mid-1990s, he has been at the Daily News since April 1986.
Journalism awards:
• Pulitzer Prize for Meritorious Public Service, 1990.
• Society of Professional Journalists: Sigma Delta Chi Award, Bronze Medallion.
• Associated Press Managing Editors’ Public Service Award.
• Investigative Reporters & Editors’ Award.
• North Carolina Press Association, First Place, Public Service Award, 1989.
• North Carolina Press Association, Second Place, Investigative Reporting, 1990.
All those were for the articles he and Betty Gray wrote about the city’s contaminated water system in 1989-1990.
• North Carolina Press Association, First Place, Investigative Reporting, 1991.
• North Carolina Press Association, Third Place, General News Reporting, 2005.
• North Carolina Press Association, Second Place, Lighter Columns, 2006.
Recently learned he will receive another award.
• North Carolina Press Association, First Place, Lighter Columns, 2010.
4. Lectured at or served on seminar panels at journalism schools at UNC-Chapel Hill, University of Maryland, Columbia University, Mary Washington University and Francis Marion University.

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