The Blooming Grove Township Hall in Richland County, Ohio, on Election Day. (Photo by Kathiann M. Kowalski/Canary Media)
This story was originally published by Canary Media.
Residents in Richland County, Ohio, voted narrowly Tuesday to keep a ban on utility-scale solar and wind across much of the community — a setback for those who hoped the referendum could serve as a blueprint for overcoming local restrictions on renewables nationwide.
The vote was 53% to 47% in favor of keeping the prohibitions adopted last July for 11 of the county’s 18 townships. Turnout was 30%, according to the election results.
The rural county’s referendum drew widespread attention because it was a rare example of community members trying to use a ballot measure to counter state and local limits on siting wind and solar energy, which have mushroomed in the U.S. in recent years. In Ohio, more than three dozen counties restrict one or both types of energy, an authority granted by a 2021 law. Fossil fuel and nuclear projects are exempt from such bans and from other hurdles the statute erected for renewable energy. If Richland County had voted to overturn its ban, it would have been a first for Ohio.
This election result was a loss for the local group Richland County Citizens for Property Rights and Job Development, which first got the issue on the ballot and then reached out to voters. The group argued that reversing the ban would attract jobs and businesses to the area while protecting property owners’ rights to lease land for the energy development of their choice.
“As a group of your Richland County neighbors, we made a commitment to stand up to our elected officials and forced a countywide conversation about property rights and government overreach,” said Morgan Carroll, a leader in the campaign against the ban. “We did it with integrity, with passion, and with a deep love for our community. That’s not nothing. That is everything.”
Campaigning in favor of the ban was Richland Farmland Preservation, a group that claimed the amount of land required for solar and was incompatible with preserving the area’s agricultural character. Darrell Banks, a committee member for that effort who is also a Richland County Commissioner, said of Tuesday’s results, “I think this is an affirmation by the voters that their township trustees and county commissioners are aligned with the best interests of their communities, and we appreciate the support of Richland County very much.”
Richland Farmland Preservation’s funders included organizations with ties to people and groups who have promoted the natural gas industry. Emails released last Friday show communications between Banks and a strategist for a political consulting firm that has done substantial work for The Empowerment Alliance, a dark-money group that promotes natural gas. Banks said that the strategist, Tom Whatman, is a “family friend.”
The links “should trouble every Richland County resident, regardless of how they voted,” said Bella Bogin, director of programs for Ohio Citizen Action, a statewide advocacy organization whose volunteers assisted Richland County Citizens for Property Rights and Job Development on the referendum. “This community deserved a fair process, and the fight to bring that back to the county is not over.”
Despite the loss, Brian McPeek, another leader of the campaign to end the renewables ban, stressed that the margin by which it lost in the very Republican county was quite narrow. “The big thing that we showed yesterday is that this was not a partisan issue.”
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