I’m always amazed when I see snow covered solar panels. Even some of of the ground mounted panels that are at a significant angle during the winter months often have snow clinging to them. In the case of the Culver home in the picture to the right, not only is there a reasonable angle on the panels that you would think would let the snow slide off, but you can see that the snow has melted off the rest of the roof around them. How is it staying on the black solar panels!?
So, I have a few ideas about this:
Can some of the power generated be used for some minimal heat for the panels. I wouldn’t think it would take a lot to warm the surface enough that the snow doesn’t stick or that it slides off. Granted, this might require some power storage to handle that middle-of-of-the-night snow, but could it be done efficiently enough to offset the power loss from leaving them snow covered?
Can the face of the panels be created with a non-stick surface like a new frying pan? Just slick it up a bit, so nothing sticks to it. That might help with dirt and debris as well. Every rain becomes a rinse cycle!
Can someone come up with the equivalent of Solar Pam? Maybe Pam is the answer!? They make it for air fryers, grills, baking, etc. Maybe they need to run with this idea. “Spray your solar panels with Pam every Fall for a snow free winter!”
Or do we go mechanical? The new installations have mechanisms where the panels follow the sun and in some farming applications the panels just go vertical to allow vehicle access through rows of panels. If 90 degrees isn’t enough, maybe they literally rotate to where the snow falls off. Or can we put the equivalent of a windshield wiper on them to squeegee them once or twice a day.
Someone is missing a good opportunity here. Maybe Elon is already working on this, but if he isn’t, he should be…
There was a County Development for the Future meeting last week and after my post on collaboration, I was pleased to see that it went back to its roots this month. MCEDC president, Greg Hildebrand, gave an update on some of MCEDC’s activities in the past quarter. He then allowed Marshall County Plan Director, Ty Adley, to speak about an upcoming initiative to update the County Comprehensive Plan. From there it transitions to reports from the communities on their projects. A few of these were Stellar Region wrap-ups and READI 1 projects, but there were many discussing their submissions for READI 2.0.
The meeting was pretty positive, with everyone supporting each others’ initiatives and inviting each other to come see the results of their work. There was none of the negative competitive complaints that have been aired earlier this year. This could partially be due to many of those voices being absent, but if they had attended, I don’t think they would have had reason to express negativity. It was all good.
Ty Adley, Marshall County Plan Director
The idea of doing a new Comprehensive Plan for the county should be an opportunity for more collaboration and was my main take-away. It’s all about how it is created, accepted and used though. In the last couple of years, I have served on two comprehensive plan committees. The differing results have been somewhat stark.
Plymouth’s plan was embraced by the Plymouth Plan Commission and and the Plymouth Common Council and Administration. I think this had a lot to do with their participation on the process. Within a month of adoption, implementation meetings were started and subcommittees where formed. A zoning review committee was formed and some zoning ordinances changes suggested by the comp plan have already been passed. A marketing committee was formed and a new logo is already out there with buttons being passed out and new banners being placed on light poles. There is a sense of urgency and the need to continue the progress.
Culver has been making false starts. After Culver’s Stellar projects were finished and their projects from Marshall County Stellar were finished, Culver began an initiative they called Culver Crossroads, patterned after Marshall County Crossroads. (Marshall County Crossroads was the group that spearheaded and achieved Stellar Region designation for Marshall County.) Subcommittees were established and meeting were held. From those meetings it became clear that Culver’s Comprehensive Plan needed updating. Most of the easily achievable goals from the 2014 plan had been made through the Stellar designations. Culver Crossroads became the Comprehensive Plan committee. Culver started this project around the same time as Plymouth or a little earlier. Culver’s plan took longer to complete. There was much more community participation in Culver, but despite that, there was much more community rancor regarding the plan. The plan went through several additional community meetings and rewrites. But the biggest difference is that the Culver plan was completed last Spring and there has yet to be an implementation committee established. The Culver Plan Commission cancelled a meeting this summer because they didn’t have anything to do! Really? After the 2014 plan, the Culver council immediately created a strategic action plan and started working it. That lead to Culver’s Stellar designation. That same push isn’t happening this time. Not only that, the Culver Crossroads committee never officially disbanded, but effectively just evaporated and lost all momentum.
So here’s a short list Ty and the county plan commission can consider to make the post planning process successful:
Keep the energy flowing. While there is generally some sense of relief that the planning process is done, there needs to be a conscious effort made push pass that and focus on the excitement of a new plan and the potential it represents.
Encourage implementation by keeping the plan front and center. Plymouth has made it agenda item at council meetings and plan commission meetings much as both Plymouth and Culver did with Stellar. This means putting it on the commissioners’ meeting agenda and the plan commission agenda so it’s seen at every meeting and advances can be celebrated and any lost momentum is questioned.
After their 2014 plan completion, the Culver town council created a Strategic Action Plan (SAP) pulling out the top items to pursue and identifying a budget to make this happen. Culver’s 2014 plan identified housing as a prime issue, created a housing subcommittee and that subcommittee’s research resulted in Culver’s pursuit of Stellar Community designation. This should be a function of the county commissioners, since they set the county direction and prepare budgets.
As Plymouth has done this year, use the comprehensive plan committee to seed an implementation committee and new subcommittees to address specific issues. In some cases, new leaders have emerged where they had specific interests, but may not have had the same energy for the plan as a whole.
There are other things, but those are the top ones that I’ve seen be successful and move the plan forward. Good Luck Ty! This will be a big undertaking!
And good job Greg! MCEDC needs to keep “bringing the communities together” high on their priority list.
There is an old adage regarding investing that when your stocks are down, you haven’t actually lost any money until you sell the stock. Because of this, the corollary has always been, that likewise, the gain is not realized until you sell the stock. Gains and Losses “on paper” don’t really matter, until they are realized when they are converted to cash or traded for other things. President Biden and now candidate Harris, along with some members of Congress are pushing a Wealth Tax, which would tax these paper gains.
As an example, if you bought 100 shares of Apple’s stock in 2010, it was 6 dollars a share. It cost $600 to make that purchase. It is now over $200 per share so your $600 investment is worth upwards of $20,000 or a 33 times as much as when you bought it. But that gain is on paper. You’re not able to use that value to purchase anything until you sell the stock, at which time you’ll take a $5,800 capital gains haircut.
The wealth tax proposal suggests that you should pay tax on that unrealized gain now. But how will the unrealized tax be determined? Apple’s stock’s all time high was $237, but its highest day end value was $234. And on August 5th with the short crash, it was at $207. Those numbers all are within the past month. With the constant fluctuation of stock prices, will there be an arbitrary day chosen? The all time high? An average of the past year? At a minimum, this seems like a record keeping nightmare. Record keeping is already a problem with the current capital gain tax where you have to keep documentation of a stock purchase price, transaction costs, and splits along the way… sometimes over decades. This is worse with a business or property where you have to track expenditures on improvements, depreciation and other things that affect value.
Another local example is what has happened to many families around Lake Maxinkuckee. Their ancestors owned a lake cottage which was bought decades ago. The property was passed down to descendants. Not all of these descendants were wealthy, but suddenly they were wealthy on paper because of the appreciation in lake property values. They were then forced to sell property that may have been in the family for generations because they couldn’t afford the real estate taxes on the appreciated value. The wealth tax could be another hit on unrealized generational wealth like that.
https://youtu.be/J5DajhNjSJE?si=xU2kSrJgQidqN1Ms
In a Kiplinger.com article, John Goralka posits this concept about estate planning, “The cash people receive from you is more cash than you have.” This translates to day to day things as well. Wealthy people don’t live like Scrooge McDuck, with a vault in the back of their home where they swim in gold coins. How much money do you think Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos have that they can access immediately? More than me, I’m sure, but as a percentage of their wealth, I would guess the percentage is smaller. Wealth is generally tied up in “things” and those things are working to help you create more wealth. Some of those things employ people who provide goods and services. It’s likely that a wealth tax would require forced liquidation of those things to pay the tax. That would result in less investment in those things so that cash that should be put to work in the economy is held back in anticipation of tax liabilities.
John Goralka’s article has made me think about my own situation. I own my home and currently have no plans to sell it. That value adds to my net worth, but it’s not money I can spend. But when I die, that home will be converted to cash to distribute to heirs. A smaller version of what Elon Musk has with Tesla and Jeff Bezos has with Amazon, but the concept is the same.
In our current DEI world, it has become de rigueur to bash successful people. Hard work, saving and investing are out of fashion. Along with the wealth tax, there are discussions about taxing 401(k)s and IRAs where people have saved too much or invested successfully. Envy of wealth has replaced the aspirational goal of becoming wealthy. Most wealth is the result of some risk. Most wealth remains at risk as it remains invested. No government has been good at playing Robin Hood. We should push back on this, as a tax on those creating wealth by a government that can’t live within its means won’t end well.
It seems odd to talk about Blight and missed opportunities at the same time, but here we are.
I attended the SBERP RDA ( South Bend Elkhart Regional Partnership Regional Development Authority) board meeting last week and heard presentations of several properties that would benefit from the Lilly Foundation funds that have been pledged to them for blight elimination. As a sign of the times, all of them included some form of housing, as additional and better housing is the biggest perceived need at this time. The project that would be most recognizable to those in our area contemplated a multi-million dollar renovation and repurposing of the old Kamm and Schellinger Brewery in Mishawaka currently known as the 100 Center.
Several properties in St. Joe and Elkhart Counties were submitted. Marshall County was conspicuously absent… thus the missed opportunity.
Blight, as referred to when talking about communities, is generally a reference to systemic vacancies. But it is sometimes referring to buildings with deferred maintenance. I’m sure we all can think of properties in our communities that would fall under one of these definitions. Without even trying, I can name seven properties that fit this definition in Culver. I can think of half a dozen in Plymouth. I know of several in LaPaz and Argos. I’m sure those familiar with Bourbon and Bremen could name similar properties there. So how did we allow this opportunity to pass us by? Couldn’t we have put together something? We are the smallest county by population in our three county regional partnership. There would have been strong incentive to try and share some of the largess if we would have presented something.
We’re at a disadvantage in these things that we need to figure out how to overcome. The internal staff available in South Bend, Mishawaka and Elkhart to throw at these opportunities far outweigh the capacity of any Marshall County community. One Marshall County is being touted as a possible answer to this, but they couldn’t muster the effort to make a presentation as they are still fighting to gain acceptance locally. This is sad, as this could have been an easy win for them that would have shown their value.
Just from attending public meetings, I know of three properties in Culver, two in Plymouth and one in LaPaz that have asked for help and would have qualified for this program. A Marshall County regional submission could have been a combination of projects that would have helped all of our communities. A rail transfer facility was floated at the PIDCO annual meeting for one of Plymouth’s blighted properties. There were opportunities there.
Submitting something would have helped our larger region as well. It’s been clear from the feedback from the Regional Partnership that they need to use some of the funding in Marshall County, but if we fail to give them something to spend it on, it’s hard for us to complain. At some point this could be a problem when the region goes for additional funding. The down state entities want to see the wealth shared.
Some of the issue has been disorganization and some has been a lack of cooperation. Both should be things that can be remedied for the greater good. The sad thing is that most Marshall County residents don’t even know about this missed opportunity. It is likely that most of the property owners of the above mentioned sites don’t know they missed an opportunity. But by definition of the program, the projects must be put forward with government support. Unfortunately, I would guess that the majority of our elected representatives aren’t aware of this either. At least that’s my hope. If they knew and did nothing, that is worse.
There will be more opportunities like this coming down the line. We need to take steps so they aren’t missed too…
