Richard Arp (left) listens as fellow Tama County Against Turbines leader Jon Winkelpleck (center) speaks during a Tama County Board of Supervisors meeting in Toledo on April 25. Arp, a Dysart resident and farmer, filed a petition for declaratory judgment against the board on June 23 over the entity’s May 16 reaffirmation of the county’s 2010 wind energy conversion system ordinance. –Photo by Ruby F. Bodeker

In a year full of important stories within the Tama-Toledo News-Chronicle coverage area, one rose above the others as the most omnipresent from March on: Salt Creek and Apex Clean Energy’s proposed wind farms in Tama County, subsequent calls for a moratorium on future developments and the battle over the rules and regulations surrounding the projects.

The group “Tama County Against Turbines,” which held its first meeting in Traer in March, emerged out of opposition to the Salt Creek and Apex proposals — the former would be located in the Tama/Toledo area, the latter in the northern part of the county around Traer — and made its presence felt at Board of Supervisors meetings as well as Planning and Zoning Commission hearings. The most notable difference between the two is that the Apex is still in early planning phases, while Salt Creek has already obtained conditional use construction permits to move forward with building the turbines.

On May 16, the Board of Supervisors voted to reaffirm the current wind energy ordinance as written with no changes. In June, Richard Arp of Dysart, one of the leaders in the TCAT movement, filed a lawsuit against the county over that decision, and his petition was subsequently dismissed in Tama County district court.

In July, TCAT members successfully circulated a petition to put a question on the ballot asking voters to expand the Board of Supervisors from three to five members, and it passed, which means the new board layout will take effect in 2025. Later that month, TCAT hosted a forum at the Wieting Theatre in Toledo with Jeff Gorball, the planning and zoning commission chair in Worth County, who explained how the ordinances were updated there.

In August, Heather Knebel, another member of the TCAT group, sued the Tama County Board of Adjustment over the Salt Creek project, and as the year went on, the Planning and Zoning Commission no longer had a quorum to take any official action. Zoning Director Todd Apfel explained that he was “advised by an attorney” not to attend a September meeting and not to hold any more meetings.

On Nov. 29 during a Planning and Zoning Commission public hearing on a proposed wind and solar moratorium, Salt Creek’s attorneys announced a lawsuit against TCAT, accusing the group of “interference with contractual relations, libel, slander, defamation, and civil conspiracy.”

Heading into 2023, construction has not yet begun on either the Salt Creek or Apex project — currently, Tama County’s only active wind turbines are in the northwest part of the county near Gladbrook — but discussion of the topic will likely continue well into the new year and beyond.