Signs of a Ceasefire in Michigan’s Energy Wars

Signs of a Ceasefire in Michigan’s Energy Wars

This is part two of a two-part series. Read part one here.

“You see that new building over there with the roof and red barn?” asks Bob Walton as he guides me through the dirt roads of Isabella County in mid-Michigan, where he serves as a trustee for Isabella Township. “I know of at least three new buildings that were put up for agriculture that are being basically paid for by windmill money.”

Walton took a break from compacting soil recently planted with soybeans to show me the tall structures, blades rotating slowly in the breeze, now visible from every angle on his land and neighboring properties. The silver towers look incongruous next to the red barns and outbuildings that would fit perfectly on a postcard from rural America. It feels almost as if you’ve landed on the set of a science fiction movie—or time-traveled into the future.

It took a while to catch up with Walton, a third-generation farmer, working some 400 acres, mostly on land that once belonged to his grandfather. Now in his 70s, he’s turning the business over to his daughter and son-in-law. That does not keep him out of his tractor, which is where I found him one afternoon in May.

“I feel bad for the people that think they’re so ugly,” he says, looking at the wind turbines near his home. “I just think they’re majestic. I love the red lights at night.”

It was not love at first sight. When a private firm called Apex Clean Energy came calling in 2018, Walton recalls, “Our first thought was, how can we stop this?”

Energy developers and utility companies began breaking ground on a significant number of big wind projects in Michigan in 2008, after a bipartisan agreement requiring 10% of the state’s electricity to be generated from carbon-free renewables. A new law passed last year by Democratic majorities in the state legislature boosted that requirement to 60% by 2035.

Most of Michigan’s early wind turbines were located north of Detroit, on the eastern side of the state that Michiganders call “The Thumb” (because it’s shaped like a thumb on a mitten). Walton and his neighbors got in touch with farmers and residents who had been living with—and collecting revenue from—wind farms for several years.

Eventually, they decided they liked what they heard. One piece of advice was to lock down compensation for any impact to productive farmland.

“If 10 years down the road we find out there’s tile damage, they still have to pay for it,” says Walton, referring the underground system of pipes, called drain tile, that protect crops from heavy rains or floods. “That’s the other thing we learned, you got to write everything in.”

‘We need energy!’

Walton, a Republican, does not often agree with Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat. He is skeptical about electric vehicles, is not vaccinated and did not agree with Whitmer’s enforced lockdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic, some of the strictest in the United States. Walton’s family property, in addition to hosting a windmill built by Apex, is also home to an oil derrick.

Oil deposits are dotted throughout Michigan farmland. Decades ago, it was common for land agents to canvass local farmers—as wind and solar developers are doing now—and offer lease payments in exchange for siting an oil or gas well on their property. Many of these wells have been capped, but the one on Bob Walton’s family farm is still active, with the revenue going to his sister.

Walton doesn’t see a new generation of energy projects as a threat to rural life. Instead, he sees a steady stream of wind turbine income—free from drought, flood or fluctuations in crop prices—that will help his daughter and son-in-law create a sustainable 21st century farm.

I called my grandkids, and they all said, ‘Grandpa I think it’s a good thing,’ ” Walton says. “Because we need energy!”

Lawyering up

Walton was first elected trustee for Isabella Township in 2016. “The reason I got on,” he says, “is I didn’t want somebody moving out from the city telling us farmers what the hell we’re going to do now.”

Apex’s proposal to build wind turbines in Isabella and nearby townships surfaced during Walton’s first term. Opponents of the project, working under the banner of a group called Isabella Wind Watch, accused him of a conflict of interest. Walton signed a lease with Apex as a private landowner and also voted to approve the project as a public official.

Bob Walton shows the Apex Clean Energy wind turbine on his property. (Roger Kerson, Barn Raiser)

Activists who wanted to block the turbines, says Walton, “fought us like crazy.” In 2018, he beat back three recall campaigns. “I lawyered up. We stopped them at the county” where recall petitions must be approved for clarity.

Walton stood for re-election in 2020 and won handily, along with other township officials who had backed the wind farm. “They put somebody up against all of us,” he says, “and we beat them two and three to one.” He was renominated for another term in an August 6 Republican primary and will be re-elected in the fall. Democrats are not contesting any Isabella Township positions, as often happens in rural Michigan.

“I’ve told my friend Albert, who’s a liberal, if it wasn’t for us conservatives in this county, they wouldn’t have got this,” says Walton.

That would be Albert Jongewaard, senior development manager for Apex, who is now based in Minnesota. From 2007 to 2010, Jongewaard raised money and managed campaigns for Democratic candidates in the Deep South. In Michigan, he spent several years working for Apex and burned a lot of shoe leather talking to farmers, landowners, residents and local officials in Isabella and Montcalm Counties.

Jongewaard likes to quote Rich Vander Veen, an early pioneer of wind energy in Michigan: “It takes ten-thousand cups of coffee to build a wind farm.”

Getting off the ground in Gratiot

Years of patient, caffeine-fueled persuasion has paid off for several development companies in Gratiot County, located in mid-Michigan just south of Isabella County. The first wind farm in Gratiot County began operating in 2012; there are now six of them, with over 400 turbines generating more than 900 megawatts of electricity. That’s roughly enough to meet the annual energy needs of 300,000 households.  

These big projects pay big taxes on windmills, which cost up to $2 million per turbine. Greater Gratiot Development, Inc., a nonprofit serving Gratiot County, created a spreadsheet showing $93 million in tax revenue collected from wind farms between 2012 and 2023. That’s more than $7 million a year, a significant boost for local governments in a county with just over 40,000 inhabitants.

Jongewaard and the team from Apex also hit paydirt in Isabella County—but not so far in Montcalm County, which sits just south of Isabella and west of Gratiot. In 2022 and 2023, there were 26 successful recall campaigns against local officials who backed solar and wind projects in Michigan. Eleven of them were in Montcalm County, enough to stall a proposed Apex wind project.








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“It is true in Michigan there is organized opposition to these projects. That’s a fact,” says Jongewaard. “People are right to ask questions, you should be asking questions.”

The issues raised by Montcalm County Citizens United, a group opposing the project, included a decline in property values, sleep deprivation from turbine noise, “damage to wildlife, domestic and farm animals, bat and bird kills, [and] massive government handouts.”

Jongewaard insists there are solid answers to these and other objections. “These projects aren’t dangerous,” he says. “They don’t have adverse health impacts. We know that through science and lived reality.”

Such arguments carried the day in Isabella County, where Apex won approval to build 136 wind turbines spread across 56,000 acres and seven townships. In 2021, Apex sold the project to DTE for an undisclosed sum. The press release announcing the sale projects $30 million in tax payments to local units of governments over the next 30 years, along with a whopping $100 million in lease payments to some 400 farmers and landowners.

That works out to about $250,000 for each leaseholder over the next three decades, an average of more than $8,000 a year. The actual payment varies, depending on how many turbines and transmission lines are sited on each property. Don Schurr was director of Greater Gratiot while wind farms were being constructed and began operating there. As one farmer told him, the annual lease payment from turbines “pays my taxes, pays my insurance and it [pays for] a nice vacation.”

Large, utility-scale windmills have transformed the landscape in Michigan’s Isabella County. (Roger Kerson, Barn Raiser)

Thanks to taxes paid by Michigan wind and solar farms, rural police and fire departments are getting new equipment and adding new shifts. Schools are being upgraded, and local roads are finally getting long-needed repairs. Farmers, meanwhile, are driving new pickups, building new barns and repairing and replacing aging farm equipment.

While all households can benefit from increased public spending, private payments to leaseholders are not universally distributed. The 400 farmers and landowners receiving lease payments from the Isabella wind farm, for example, are just a fraction of the more than 4,000 households in the seven townships where the project is located.

Sarah Mills, an associate professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Architecture and Urban Planning, has closely studied the siting of renewable energy projects in rural communities. Energy developers, she says, have started to use “good neighbor” agreements, which provide at least some payments to everyone in the footprint of a project. The compensation, she says, is “for access to wind that blows over your property.”

“There are townships in the Thumb where 85% of the property owners are participants in a wind farm,” says Mills, even if some of them have no turbines or transmission lines on their land.

Big money, big headaches

The recent influx of energy developer dollars—lots of them—into Michigan’s rural communities has real benefits, but also causes real headaches. According to Colleen Stebbins, a longtime official of Winfield Township in Montcalm County, wind farm opponents “were so afraid if I put a turbine on my property, I’d make a million, while they, with a little piece of lake property, would get nothing.”

While serving as township clerk, Stebbins declined to sign a lease with the company on her personal property, seeking to avoid any conflict of interest. Seeing benefits for the township, she voted to approve Apex’s bid to site a wind farm. As a result, opponents of the project organized a recall election and won a majority to remove her from office in November 2022.

Stebbins eventually did sign a lease with Apex, she says, “after I got recalled.”

The politics of energy production in Michigan has played out differently in three adjoining counties. Isabella, Gratiot and Montcalm are all home to hundreds of small farms, averaging a few hundred acres each. The population is overwhelmingly white—88% or more—in all three counties, with a tiny share of foreign-born residents. Donald Trump won all three counties in 2016 and again in 2020.

So why did conservative township voters in Gratiot and Isabella accept renewable energy projects, while Montcalm voters joined a rebellion against them?

Farmers vs. lakers 

One factor could be geography. Montcalm has more interior lakes than either Gratiot or Isabella. That means more homeowners own lakeside, non-farm holdings and would not receive the windfall in lease revenue from wind turbines or solar farms, sometimes by choice.

“This is just not a land use they think is appropriate, and it’s not worth it to them,” says the University of Michigan’s Sarah Mills. These homeowners, who often relocated precisely to enjoy a peaceful rural environment, are especially sensitive to disruptions that may be caused by utility-scale energy projects.

Ryan VanSolkema was elected supervisor of Winfield Township in rural Montcalm County in November of 2022, during the heart of the controversy over Apex’s proposed wind project. He won a recall election during the same 2022 campaign which saw Colleen Stebbins lose her position as township clerk. He is running, unopposed, for another term this year.

“I had just moved up here and bought a house on the lake,” says VanSolkema. “I wasn’t looking to lose 30% of the value of the home I just purchased.” Nobody wants to buy a home, he says, that looks out on 600-foot-tall wind turbines—and he’s not convinced there is any need to burn less carbon while generating electricity.

“Climate change is a hoax,” he says. “It’s just a way for government to spend money and regulate. Almost 50 years I’ve been alive, what has changed? Literally nothing.”

The intense opposition to wind and solar farms that developed in Montcalm County is far from unique. “We’ve had projects blocked all over the state,” says Ed Rivet, executive director of the Michigan Conservative Energy Forum, a group that supports an “all-of-the-above” free market approach. The group receives backing from foundations and energy developers through the nationwide Conservative Energy Network. Rivet estimates that in the past five years, as much as two gigawatts of solar energy production in Michigan has been blocked by local activists. That’s the equivalent of two nuclear power plants worth of energy. 

Pushback is by no means confined to the state of Michigan. Researchers at Columbia Law School have found nearly 400 “laws and regulations to block or restrict renewable energy facilities” in 41 different states, with hundreds of projects encountering “significant opposition.”

Turning the tide

In Michigan, players on all sides of the controversy are recognizing the changed reality created by Public Act 233, part of a package of clean energy laws passed by Democrats and signed by Gov. Whitmer last November. It puts final siting authority for large-scale solar and wind projects in the hands of the three-member statewide Public Service Commission (PSC).

“Local authorities don’t have any impact,” says Kevon Martis. “You’ll see fewer recalls of local officials.” A home remodeler and county commissioner in Lenawee County, Martis has been involved in campaigns against renewables since he blocked a wind project in his community of Riga Township back in 2009.

Kevon Martis, a longtime campaigner against renewable energy projects, speaks at a Town Hall sponsored by Citizens for Local Choice in April, at Oskar Scot’s restaurant in Caledonia, Michigan. (Roger Kerson, Barn Raiser)

After an unsuccessful petition drive this year to overturn P.A. 233 by statewide referendum, Martis is ready to try again in 2026.

On August 6, he was renominated by GOP voters for a second term as county commissioner and will face no Democratic opposition in the fall. Martis’s primary opponent, Palmyra Township Supervisor David Pixley, was endorsed by Private Property Rights PAC (PPR PAC) a new independent expenditure committee, or Super PAC.  

This summer in Michigan, PPR PAC endorsed 20 local candidates in Republican primaries in Montcalm, Ionia and other counties where there has been controversy over siting solar and wind projects. Nine of their endorsed candidates won their primary elections, some by small margins.

The PPR PAC website makes no mention of solar, wind or renewable energy. The group backs candidates, it says, who support “policies that reduce excessive regulation and oppose broad governmental overreach into property rights.”

Cabell Hobbs, treasurer of PPR PAC, is also treasurer of the Apex Clean Energy PAC. He has served in similar roles for GOP candidates, including George W. Bush, Ted Cruz and John Bolton.

Apex PAC’s election filings show contributions to Republican and Democratic candidates, a $2,500 donation to the Pennsylvania Solar PAC in 2021 and a $5,000 donation to the D.C.-based Community Solar Action Fund in 2024. There is no record of disbursements in Michigan. 

Apex’s Albert Jongewaard says he is not familiar with PPR PAC, nor are his colleagues currently working on the company’s Michigan projects. An email to PPR PAC resulted in an automatic reply from Rural Economic Development PAC (R.E.D. PAC), a Texas-based super PAC which also touts protecting private property among its top priorities.

R.E.D. PAC, where Cabell Hobbs is also treasurer, has received over $1 million from Conservatives for a Clean Energy Future (CCEF). Larry Ward, CCEF’s president and CEO, is a former political director of the Michigan Republican Party. The group was formed, he says, as the advocacy arm of the Conservative Energy Network.

“We like a whole list of energy sources,” he says, including advanced wind, solar and nuclear technologies. What his organization doesn’t like, he says, is government—or angry neighbors—“telling farmers what they can and can’t do with their property.”

CCEF is organized as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit. Donations to the group are not tax deductible, and it is not required to disclose its donors. “Everyone who contributes to us,” says Ward, “would rather it be that way.”

This is the topsy-turvy world of renewable energy in Michigan. Republicans backing the conservative cause of private property rights are using a dark money loophole to help farmers and landowners participate in green energy projects, a liberal priority supported by Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. These strange bedfellows, plus a few others, may now be finding a way to live together.

Although the state’s PSC has the final say to site renewable projects, utility and energy developers still have the option of trying first to work directly with local authorities. That’s taking place now—in Montcalm County, of all places. DTE Energy broke ground there in June on a 554-acre solar farm.

At a public hearing on the project last December, Evergreen Township Supervisor Andy Ross observed that with P.A. 233 in place, local governments are better off getting involved with renewable projects to make sure local concerns are addressed. These include issues like setbacks from adjacent properties, noise limits and a $5 million bond secured by DTE, which guarantees funding to decommission the project.

“If we were to deny their [DTE’s] application and they went through the state siting process, our restrictions are tighter than the state’s,” he told the Montcalm/Ionia Daily News. “What we’re working together on is way better than what the state siting would be.”

“I think there is a path forward for developers to work with local governments,” says PSC chair Dan Scripps, an energy attorney and former Democratic state representative from Northern Michigan. He was appointed to the commission in 2019 by Whitmer, who named him chair in 2020.

“I’m not going to be disappointed,” he says, “if we never get a case.”

The post Signs of a Ceasefire in Michigan’s Energy Wars appeared first on Barn Raiser.

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Trump Wins Michigan with Slightly Greater Support in Rural Areas and Suburbs

Donald Trump won the Michigan primary with widespread support across the state, with slightly higher margins in rural areas and the suburbs of metropolitan areas, according to a Daily Yonder analysis.

The results were a soft echo of former President Trump’s performance in the South Carolina primary on Saturday, in which he polled strongest among suburban and rural voters.

In Michigan, Trump defeated former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley by 3 to 1 (77% to 23%) in the state’s 50 rural (nonmetropolitan) counties. These voters represented 25% of the turnout in Tuesday’s primary.

He did nearly as well in the state’s small metropolitan areas, which include eight counties and 12% of the turnout. Cities in these small metropolitan areas are Battle Creek, Jackson, Midland, Monroe, Muskegon, Saginaw, Bay City, and Nile-Benton Harbor.

Trump also received over 70% of the two-candidate vote in the suburbs of major metropolitan areas (Detroit and Grand Rapids) and medium-sized metropolitan areas (Lansing, Flint, Kalamazoo, Ann Arbor, and South Bend, Indiana). 

Voters in the Grand Rapids and Detroit metropolitan areas constituted nearly two-thirds of the turnout. Voters in small metropolitan areas were 12% of the electorate on Tuesday.

Definitions

The Daily Yonder analysis uses the 2013 Office of Management and Budget Metropolitan Statistical Areas to define rural.

  • We define counties that are not located within a metropolitan area as rural. Under the OMB’s 2013 system, nonmetropolitan counties don’t have a city of 50,000 or greater and don’t have close economic ties to a county that does have a city of 50,000 or greater.
  • Major metropolitan suburbs are the outlying counties of metros with a population of over 1 million.
  • Medium-sized metropolitan core counties are the central counties of metros with a population of 250,000 to under 1 million.
  • Medium-sized metropolitan suburbs are the outlying counties of metros with a population of 250,000 to under 1 million. 
  • Small metropolitan areas include all counties in metros of fewer than 250,000 residents.

The post Trump Wins Michigan with Slightly Greater Support in Rural Areas and Suburbs appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

Wisconsin governor’s 400-year veto angers opponents in state with long history of creative cuts

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Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletter to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup. This story is published in partnership with The Associated Press and includes localized reporting from Wisconsin Watch.

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers’ partial veto that attempts to lock in a school funding increase for 400 years drew outrage and surprise from his political opponents, but it’s just the latest creative cut in a state that’s home to the most powerful partial gubernatorial veto in the country.

“Everybody will shout and scream,” said former Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle, “but he’s got ’em.”

Wisconsin governors have the most expansive partial veto power in the country because, unlike in other states, they can strike nearly any part of a budget bill. That includes wiping out numbers, punctuation and words in spending bills to sometimes create new law that wasn’t the intention of the Legislature.

That’s exactly what the Democratic Evers did on Wednesday with a two-year state budget passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature.

The Legislature had language in the budget increasing the per pupil spending authority for K-12 public schools by $325 in the 2023-24 and 2024-25 school years. Evers, a former state education secretary and public school teacher and administrator before that, vetoed the “20” and the hyphen to make the end date 2425.

The change means that until a future Legislature and governor undo it, the amount schools can spend through a combination of property taxes and state aid will increase by $325 annually until 2425. That’s farther in the future — 402 years — than the United States has been a country — 247 years.

“It’s creative for sure,” said Bill McCoshen, a lobbyist who previously worked under former Gov. Tommy Thompson.

Creative, but not unprecedented.

Reshaping state budgets through the partial veto is a longstanding act of gamesmanship in Wisconsin between the governor and Legislature, as lawmakers try to craft bills in a way that are largely immune from creative vetoes. Vetoes, even the most outlandish, are almost never overridden because it takes a two-thirds majority of the Legislature to do it.

Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, during a Thursday interview on WISN-AM, vowed to try, though he admitted it would be difficult.

Vos called Evers’ 400-year veto “an unprecedented brand-new way to screw the taxpayer … that was never imagined by a previous governor and certainly wouldn’t by anybody who thinks there is a fair process in Wisconsin.”

Former Republican Gov. Scott Walker in 2017 used his veto power to extend the deadline of a state program program from 2018 to 3018. That came to be known as the “thousand-year veto.” He also delayed the start date of another program by 60 years.

The Republican Thompson was known for his use of the “Vanna White” veto, named for the co-host of Wheel of Fortune who flips letters to reveal word phrases. Thompson holds the record for the most partial vetoes by any governor in a single year — 457 in 1991. Evers this year made 51.

Wisconsin’s partial veto is uniquely powerful because it allows the governor to change the intent of the Legislature, just as Evers did, said Kristoffer Shields, director of the Center on the American Governor at Rutgers University. Shields said he plans to cite the latest Evers veto when teaching about executive power.

“Many people in Wisconsin, I suspect, are surprised that the governor can do this,” Shields said. “And now that we know he can do this, that can lead to changes.”

Wisconsin’s partial veto power was created by a 1930 constitutional amendment, but it’s been weakened over the years, including in reaction to vetoes made by Thompson and Doyle.

Voters adopted a constitutional amendments in 1990 and 2008 that took away the ability to strike individual letters to make new words — the “Vanna White” veto — and eliminated the power to eliminate words and numbers in two or more sentences to create a new sentence — the “Frankenstein” veto. Numerous court decisions have also narrowed the veto power.

Rick Esenberg, director of the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, said he expected there to be a legal challenge to Evers’ 400-year veto.

“This is just a ridiculous way to make law,” Esenberg said.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court sided with Esenberg’s group and undid three of Evers’ partial vetoes in 2020, but a majority of justices did not issue clear guidance on what was allowed. Two justices did say that partial vetoes can’t be used to create new policies. In August, the court flips from conservative to liberal control. That further clouds how it may rule on veto power, an issue that over the decades has drawn bipartisan support and criticism.

Even as questions about the legality of the veto swirl, conservatives are trying to benefit politically by arguing that the ever-increasing spending authority Evers enacted will open the door to higher property taxes.

“The veto would allow property taxes to skyrocket over the next 400 years,” Republican Assembly Majority Leader Tyler August said in a statement. “Taxpayers need to remember this when getting their tax bills this December.”

But Doyle, the former Democratic governor who issued nearly 400 partial vetoes over eight years, praised Evers for effectively restoring an automatic increase in school spending authority that had been in place starting in the 1990s. Doyle’s successor, Walker, and the GOP-controlled Legislature removed it.

“What Governor Evers did was masterful and really important and something that everybody should have expected him to do,” Doyle said. “I’m sure they’re kicking themselves over why they didn’t they see this little number thing.”

Wisconsin governor’s 400-year veto angers opponents in state with long history of creative cuts is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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