Elk Creek Solar will pay Spring Brook $700,000 annually and Dunn County $900,000
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By LeAnn R. Ralph
MENOMONIE — The Elk Creek Solar Project will now pay the Town of Spring Brook $700,000 annually, and Dunn County will receive $900,000, while the Elk Mound school district will receive $60,000 per year.
The state of Wisconsin has increased the utility aid shared revenue payments, said Dylan Stickney, a project manager with Elk Creek Solar/TED Renewables, at the Dunn County Board’s February 21 meeting.
The increase in the shared revenue is approximately $200,000 per year for the Town of Spring Brook and Dunn County. Under the previous shared revenue payments, the Town of Spring Brook would have received $500,000 and Dunn County would have received $700,000 every year over a 35-year period.
The $60,000 per year payments for 20 years to the Elk Mound school district is a charitable pledge to the school district by Elk Creek Solar and is not required by state law.
The 300 megawatt solar project will have 76 megawatts of battery storage and will cover approximately 2,000 acres in the Town of Spring Brook.
The project is located south of county Highway E.
Payments
Construction is expected to start in the fourth quarter of 2024 and will finish in the second quarter of 2026, Stickney told the county board.
All together, over 35 years, the Town of Spring Brook will receive $24.57 million, and Dunn County will receive $31.13 million. Spring Brook is expected to receive $702,000 annually, and Dunn County is expected to receive $918,000 annually, he said.
Presumably the utility shared revenue works in the same way as other shared revenue, so the $702,000 payments to the Town of Spring Brook and the $918,000 payments to Dunn County could reduce the property tax levy by those amounts paid by town and county residents, if the annual budgets did not increase, since municipalities operate under levy limits set by the state legislature.
The utility shared revenue also could offset the allowable increase per year in the levy limits, measured by net new construction, which could allow Spring Brook and Dunn County to increase their budgets by those amounts without increasing the property tax levy.
PSC
Last fall, the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin issued a Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity for the Elk Creek Solar project, Stickney said.
Two of the conditions included screening for neighbors and planting native seed mixes, he said.
According to Stickney’s presentation, the condition for screening requires Elk Creek Solar to “implement a landscape screening plan in coordination with interested non-participating landowners to reduce visual impact from residents.”
The other condition Stickney spoke about in his presentation requires that “areas of exposed soils shall be vegetated as soon as possible and seeded with cover crops and/or native seed mix to minimize erosion potential and prevent the establishment of invasive species.”
Elk Creek Solar intended to include residential landscape screening from the start, Stickney said.
Elk Creek Solar also intends to use a pollinator-friendly seed mix that will minimize erosion and stop invasive plant species from growing in the project area, he said.
Those were two of the conditions stipulated by the PSC, and all of the information about the project, including all of the conditions, is available on the PSC’s website, Stickney said.
For those who are interested, you can look up the file on Elk Creek Solar on the PSC’s website. Search for Docket Number 9819-CE-100.
Charitable contributions
The Elk Creek Solar project also has entered into an agreement with the Elk Mound school district for a charitable pledge of $60,000 per year for 20 years, Stickney said.
The Elk Mound school district will lose a certain amount of property taxes each year because the land use will be converted from farming to a utility that provides electricity.
Elk Creek Solar also has to date made more than $6,500 in charitable contributions to Stepping Stones of Dunn County, the Elk Mound Community Fire Department and the Community Foundation of Dunn County, Stickney said.
Neighborhood
Larry Bjork, county board supervisor from Menomonie, noted that the Elk Creek Solar project is in the district he represents, which includes the Town of Spring Brook.
“It’s in my neighborhood. My beef cows are sleeping on corn stalks that came from your fields,” he said.
For people traveling on county Highway E, they are driving on the Yellowstone Trail, an interesting part of the history of Dunn County, Bjork said.
The Yellowstone Trail, established in May of 1912, connected the east coast to the west coast with a highway through the upper tier of states. The Yellowstone Trail went from the Atlantic Ocean in Plymouth, Massachusetts, to the Pacific Ocean in Seattle, Washington.
The neighbors were expecting the installation to start sooner but now they have received notification that they can put in crops for another year, Bjork said.
Bjork noted that he cannot criticize his neighbors for “getting a good deal on their land and said there was a time he would have rented his own farm for $1 per year in order just to be able to keep his land.
“I can’t complain about it, but I can’t be happy about it,” he said.
The pollinator mixes will be a nice addition to the landscape, but “it will be a dramatic change in my neighborhood,” Bjork said.
Bjork went on to say that he wished the solar panels were built in the United States and that he had heard the panels that will be used in the Elk Creek Solar project are built in China.
“I welcome Elk Creek Solar as a neighbors, but I am sad I will be seeing solar panels instead of crops,” he said.
