April 17, 2014
Texas

City makes big move against wind farm

Andrew Ellison | April 16, 2014 | www.kristv.com

CORPUS CHRISTI – The City Council has taken another step in it’s effort to try and block and proposed wind farm out near Chapman Ranch.

The council voted yesterday to annex that land, which currently lies within the city’s extraterritorial jurisdiction.

City Manager Ron Olson says he hopes the process will take somewhere between 60 and 90 days.

When it’s done, the city will own that land, but with that ownership, comes a number of things that need to be worked out.

Largest among those is what kind of utilities the city will have to provide out there.

But that’s all really besides the point, because this is about stopping a company called APEX Clean Energy from building a wind farm out there.

The council, and city officials believe that wind farm will hurt and perhaps prevent lots of future economic development.

We’re talking about homes and shopping centers. Basically, all the kinds of stuff you see on the southside of town.

Olson says if they can’t sop the wind farm, they at least want to annex the land, and make some money off it.

“Each of the windmills is worth something close to 3 million dollars. I think there’s going to be 175 of them. So that amounts to a significant amount of taxable value,” Olson says.

He added that if APEX wants to build this wind farm, there’ s not much the city can do, but the city will negotiate as best it can and try to stop it from happening if possible.

The last time the city annexed anything was in the early 2000’s when it took over a piece of land on the island that used to belong to Port Aransas.

URL to article:  https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2014/04/17/city-makes-big-move-against-wind-farm/