Letter: Dubois County needs to move quickly as solar moratorium deadline approaches

ByLetter to the Editor Reading Time: 2 minutes

Dubois County has spent considerable time, money, and public effort developing its first Comprehensive Plan. Residents have attended meetings, completed surveys, offered comments, and made their concerns known. Now it is time to finish the plan and make it available to the public.

The Comprehensive Plan should provide the foundation for how Dubois County handles future growth and major land-use decisions. That includes utility-scale solar, battery energy storage systems (BESS), wind energy, data centers—including artificial intelligence facilities—and other large-scale or emerging energy and industrial developments.

These projects can affect farmland, neighboring property owners, roads, emergency services, water resources, schools, utilities, and the overall character of our communities. Decisions with consequences lasting decades should not be made without a clear countywide land-use framework.

The Commissioners should establish a firm goal of completing and publicly releasing the Comprehensive Plan well before the end of 2026. The public should also have adequate time to review the plan before decisions are made based upon it.

Just as importantly, the county needs to prepare now for the possibility that the plan and the land-use protections that follow it will not be ready by December.

If the Comprehensive Plan, zoning framework, special-use standards, and necessary enforcement mechanisms are not finalized and ready before the current moratorium approaches expiration, the Commissioners should have a new moratorium prepared and ready to adopt without a gap in protection.

That moratorium should be comprehensive. It should address new and existing projects, to the fullest extent permitted by Indiana law, involving:

  • Utility-scale solar;
  • Solar combined with BESS;
  • Stand-alone BESS facilities;
  • Wind energy;
  • Data centers, including AI data centers;
  • Other emerging large-scale energy generation, storage, transmission-support, or similarly intensive land uses that may not be adequately addressed by existing county regulations.

The purpose of a moratorium is not to permanently prohibit development. It is to give county government the time necessary to establish reasonable rules before additional projects move forward.

Dubois County should not find itself in December racing against a deadline or discovering that the existing moratorium has expired before permanent protections are in place.

We have an opportunity to do this correctly: finish the Comprehensive Plan, make it public, establish strong land-use and special-use protections, and have a backup moratorium ready if that work is not completed.

The people of Dubois County deserve certainty about how their land, communities, and quality of life will be protected. We should plan first and permit second—not the other way around.

John Kaltenbacher
Citizens for Safe Communities

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