Tri-Cities nonprofit to sue after Gov. Inslee loosens rules for WA’s largest wind farm

Tri-Cities CARES plans to file a lawsuit challenging Washington Gov. Jay Inslee’s decision to approve the Horse Heaven wind farm with fewer restrictions than originally recommended.

The wind farm, which would be the largest in the state, would stretch along 24 miles of the Horse Heaven Hills just south of the Tri-Cities, from Finley to Benton City.

The nonprofit group, Tri-Cities Community Action for Responsible Environmental Stewardship, launched a fundraising drive this week that helped it gauge interest in bringing the issue before the Washington Supreme Court.

The donations and pledges it received were “sufficient, invigorating and encouraging enough” to convince the group to proceed, said Paul Krupin, Tri-Cities CARES board member.

“We are very happy the community is so supportive,” Krupin said.

Although Tri-Cities CARES has not released how much money it was able to raise for a lawsuit, Krupin said it is enough to get the lawsuit started.

The group has estimated that a lawsuit could cost upwards of about $200,000, or a little more than what it previously raised and spent so far fighting the Horse Heaven Clean Energy Center proposed by Scout Clean Energy.

It is continuing to raise money and also is talking to Benton County and the Yakama Nation, which also have standing to sue.

Inslee rejected tighter restrictions

Any lawsuits must be filed by Dec. 2 in Thurston County Superior Court before being heard by the higher court. If successful, a lawsuit could halt or limit the size of the proposed wind farm, which also would include solar panels and battery storage.

Krupin said the lawsuit means one to two years of hard work ahead for Tri-Cities CARES volunteers, who have hired Seattle attorney Richard Aramburu.

Inslee approved a revised recommendation to allow the Horse Heaven wind farm on Oct. 18 and the clock on filing a lawsuit started when Inslee’s decision was announced Nov. 1.

Inslee signed a site certification agreement for the project, which Canadian company Scout Clean Energy also must sign for the project to move forward. As of Thursday there was no word that Scout had signed the agreement.

The Washington state Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council (EFSEC) spent three years studying the project, proposed for up to 222 turbines about 500 feet tall before recommending to the governor that the project be approved with about half the number of proposed turbines.

Inslee sent that recommendation back to the council, saying the council needed to prioritize the need for clean energy and make a less restrictive recommendation for his approval of the project.

The council relented and its final recommendation, which Inslee approved, would reduce the proposed number of turbines by about 23%, unless Scout Clean Energy could find space for them elsewhere on the project.

The initial recommendation to Inslee provided mitigation measures for endangered ferruginous hawks, Yakama Nation traditional cultural properties, the impacts of turbines on fighting wildfires and the visual impacts of the turbines to the greater Tri-Cities area.

But the revised recommendation approved by Inslee no longer directly addresses the visual impacts of wind turbines along the southern skyline of the Tri-Cities and reduces other mitigation measures.

Horse Heaven Hills view

EFSEC officials say mitigation measures required for other reasons, including limited restrictions for tribal traditional cultural properties, would help reduce the visual impacts.

While unions have supported the project as an important source of construction jobs close to home for their workers in the Tri-Cities area, opposition has come from residents who object to what they call the “industrialization” of the southern skyline in a community that prides itself on the colorful sunsets of its desert vistas.

Tri-Cities CARES has estimated that between the Horse Heaven wind farm as originally proposed and the nearby smaller Nine Canyon wind farm, just over 100,000 resident of Benton County would live within six miles of a turbine.

That’s five times more than the estimated 20,000 people who live within six miles of a wind farm across the rest of the state.

The new recommendation also limited restrictions on wind turbine placement to protect tribal cultural resources to only the area within one mile of Webber Canyon.

Also under the relaxed mitigation measures for endangered ferruginous hawks, the area in which turbines could not be allowed was reduced from a 2-mile zone to a 0.6-mile zone around nests that at one time had been used by the hawks.

However, turbines may only be sited within the 0.6- to 2-mile radius of nests if a new technical advisory committee decides the nesting site or foraging habitat there is no longer viable.

Tri-Cities CARES sees multiple possibilities for challenging the decision, including the visual impacts of the project, the lack of testimony allowed about firefighting restrictions and the lack of testimony allowed about the need for the project, which Inslee later said should be a priority in the recommendation.