Easterday Construction has always supported Marshall County Community Foundation (MCCF). This year there’s a way to increase the impact of your donation either through existing funds or starting one of your own. Consider MCCF in your end of year charitable giving.
For those of you unfamiliar with internet acronyms, IYKYK = If You Know, You Know. It’s generally used as a hashtag for an image with a second meaning, inside joke, or something else often hidden in plain sight. Despite having known Gary Neidig, ITAMCO and many of the Neidig family for decades, I was surprised by some of the things I learned about Gary and Robin at the MUAC (Marian University/Ancilla College) Changing Lives Scholarship Dinner at Swan Lake Resort last Thursday. I was there representing MCCF (Marshall County Community Foundation). I felt like I was out of the loop on the picture to the right. I wasn’t privy to the #iykyk meme, despite knowing Gary and Robin forever!
I’d always know the Neidigs as very family oriented. They are extremely dedicated to their family, their company and their Church. My father and I worked with Gary and his father and uncle for years doing work at the ITAMCO plant (then known as Indiana Tool and Manufacturing) and their Church, the Grace Baptist Church in Plymouth. My father and Gary’s Uncle Don did millions of dollars of work with only handshake contracts. We doubled the size of the Plymouth plant and built their world class office space. We helped them renovate and modernize the Grace Baptist Church, built the Christian School adjacent to the Church and later added the gymnasium to the school. We even did an addition to Gary and Robin’s house!
I knew that Gary had been drawn into some of the regional planning meetings through MCEDC in recent years. I served with him on the Marshall County Crossroads Committee and knew he remained involved and now chaired the next reiteration of Crossroads, One Marshall County. I served with him on the Plymouth Comprehensive Plan Committee as we updated the plan for a new decade. But at the dinner last week, I learned that there was much more he was doing behind the scenes in other areas. I was not surprised that Gary would be doing good things… He always has… I was surprised at how much there was in which I didn’t know he was involved. Much the same with Robin. I knew she was involved in the Church and school, but not the other things that came out during the award presentation.
It was a reminder to me that there are unseen layers to people all around us. Who among us hasn’t seen an award going to someone we thought was less deserving than others we knew. Maybe we shouldn’t be too hasty thinking we know everything. Gary & Robin were deserving of this award just for the things I knew they did, and then I learned there was so much more. There are no doubt others in our community involved to greater depths than many of us realize. Maybe some of those other recipients we heard about and questioned had impacts of which we weren’t aware. Maybe we weren’t in their circle of #IYKYK…
I’ve been watching/reading about all the Solar Farm controversy in Marshall County with a mixture of amusement and disappointment. While I don’t advocate unlimited rights to a property owner, I would advocate tipping the scale in favor of the owner’s decisions about use of their property. My main thought is how the more things change, the more they stay the same. This is a repeat of what happened when there was the discussion about wind farms in Marshall County a few years back. (Wind Farm Posts here and here.)
In both cases, spurious arguments are put forth, when I believe the real reason for disliking either of them is aesthetics. Those against them don’t like looking at them. As with wind farms, I can understand that and feel it is a valid argument. To each, there own… But it was a much more understandable argument regarding wind farms than solar panels.
The setbacks of 300′, 500′ or more being requested seem ridiculous. Marshall County isn’t a table top, but it is pretty darned flat. The high point in Marshall County is 895 MSL and the low point is 775 MSL with an average of 810 MSL per the Joint Highway Research Project by Purdue University. That’s not a whole lot of topographic relief and I’m suspicious that the low number is actually under water! That tells you that there aren’t many areas where a grove of 20′ to 30′ evergreens or mixed plantings wouldn’t hide what’s in the field from anyone on the ground; even from a distance. This would solve the concern some have expressed about the sun reflecting off the panels too. Large setbacks are usually used to protect against noise or odors, not visual issues that can be hidden by a vegetative buffer. These setbacks requested are meant to make property unbuildable unless it’s an excessively large tract of land. Admittedly, I’m pretty indifferent on the aesthetic issue, but I don’t know that a picked cornfield with an inactive sprinkler system sitting vacant from Fall until Spring is a particularly bucolic landscape view either. It is just one of those things that we live with and allow to the property owner.
There is the argument about chemicals from solar panels leaching into the soil. For the most part, new solar panels are solid state devices composed of silicon and glass, with trace amounts of gold, silver, copper and other valuable materials which people in the industry will be glad to retrieve and recycle. There is also the issue that most farmers are leasing land that is marginally productive as farmland, which requires large chemical applications to make them productive. Some of these properties were potato farms in the past, which required hundreds of pounds of fertilizer per acre. As part of this argument, I’ve heard, “Why not put solar panels up to cover parking lots and buildings first, before threatening farmland!?” If there was any merit to the chemical leaching argument, I would much rather have any bad things filtered through soil, rather than running directly into storm drains and thus, our rivers and streams. There’s enough of that coming off cars and trucks in parking lots and on streets. Not that I don’t see merit in solar panels for covered parking. But I assume it’s the same reason they don’t graze cows in solar farm fields. They would need to greatly beef up (pun intended) the support structures for cows rubbing against them and thus, even more so for cars.
There are those that express concern about the loss of farmland which currently produces food products. I would prefer to see some soil analysis and see solar farms placed only on marginally productive land, but much of the placement is based on access to the electric grid. To some extent this is self regulating with property owners making the economic decision themselves. I am sure, if the payout for farming was greater, the land would remain in crops. At it’s greatest proposed coverage, the proposed solar farms would only cover single digit percentages of the total Marshall County farmland available. Is this any different than allowing subdivisions to be built and lots to be sold for housing or industry? Plus, check out some of the interesting things Purdue University is suggesting for agrivoltaics. There are options to keep farms productive as food sources as well as for harvesting solar. They’re just two different ways of harvesting sunshine.
There are those that say solar is a boondoggle and wouldn’t make it without subsidies. Possibly, but farmers know how subsidies work as they are sometimes paid not to plant, told what to plant and subsidized for planting specific crops. They are well versed in how to play that game and how to achieve the best economic benefit from it. Are solar panels the solution to global warming? Hardly. Nor has much of what’s out there touted to change the weather ever resulted in the the reputed outcome. But let landowners take advantage of the rare opportunity to benefit from this one.
One thing that has come out in this that particularly scares me is the bonding or other means of providing for decommissioning of these installations at the end of their life. If we start down that path, where does it end? Drive around Marshall County and you will see abandoned silos, farm windmills, railroad beds on abandoned rail lines, railroad depots, grain elevators, former school buildings, houses, collapsing barns and unusable commercial buildings. That same argument could be used to say we should prevent any of those things happening again, but can you imagine the cost of construction if you had to plan/pay for end of life removal of EVERYTHING? Most construction puts significant funds at risk when the investment in these these things is made. The increased cost due to this increased risk would undoubtedly stop some expansions and new endeavors from happening. In the case of solar farms, you’re asking the companies involved to plan for the cost of removal 30 years from now. What does that look like and how would labor inflation costs balloon that? Building’s generally have lifespans of 2 to 4 times that. How does that even work!?
Again, I believe all of this amounts to spurious concerns, past the aesthetic issues. I’m not thrilled with the aesthetics of high voltage powerlines crisscrossing Marshall County, Those power lines are largely what makes Marshall County attractive to solar farms. But these things benefit my life. Stopping them means hurting other property owners and limiting their livelihoods. If we collectively care enough about stopping these things, then we should put our money where our mouth is and pool funds to purchase and control the property ourselves. Otherwise, be quiet and let progress move on…
After almost two years of work by local volunteers through various committees with the help of MACOG, the final draft of the new comprehensive plan is available for review here.
A community’s Comprehensive Plan should be revised every 5-10 years. I had advocated for the plan to be revised sooner (I thought Culver’s 2020 Vision had a nice ring to it!), since we completed many of the goals of the previous 2014 Comp Plan through the Stellar Communities funding. Unfortunately, like many other things, Covid stopped early progress on this.
It is generally the responsibility of the Plan Commission to create a new Comp Plan, but in this case, the Culver Plan Commission delegated this to the fledgling Culver Crossroads group. With the help of MACOG, Culver Crossroads held multiple meetings, public events and other opinion gathering methods to take the pulse of the community and set goals for the future. I’ve participated in this from the start and I believe the new plan captures a lot of vision needed for the future of Culver.
Once the document is finalized, the work needs to continue. The plan is worthless sitting on a shelf. It needs to be revisited often by all branches of Culver government so that its goals can be implemented and its guidance can be observed in the decision making process. Since it was created by the citizens, it should be respected as the new direction for Culver.
This is your last chance to be one of those citizens giving final input before it goes to the Plan Commission and Town Council for adoption. Even if it’s just catching a spelling error or punctuation error, let MACOG know, so this is the best document it can be. This will be our plan for the next 10 years and the face of Culver when new developers, businesses and residents consider locating in Culver.
Solar Panel Ideas
January 13, 2025
Kevin Berger
Commentary, Humor, Personal, Rants, Tips
Humor, Tips
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:
Someone is missing a good opportunity here. Maybe Elon is already working on this, but if he isn’t, he should be…
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