Open Letter to the Holt County Supervisors

First of all, thank you for giving me the opportunity to address your group about the proposed planning commission changes. I thought we had killed this a while back and would not hear from the commission until they had a complete plan that had been thoroughly vetted. I have been on quite a few boards in my life. I can appreciate that you are doing what you think is best. I would ask you to consider an additional point of view.

• I had a conversation at Elgin a few years back, that sounded like what I believe is happening again here, now. I was talking to a city cousin of mine at a family reunion, and he asked, “I wonder what grandpa (he was a dryland farmer), would have thought about all those pivots and windmills across the county?” I told him, “Well, he starved out a living for 40 years, while having a gold mine under his feet and another above his head. Without that change, they would still be starving today. So, I guess he probably would have wished he had our opportunities and would have been pretty happy with them. And you might not have had to move to the city to make a living.”

• I have now been here for 22 years and it seems as though every time something new comes along, there is a small group of people who have to be against whatever that particular thing is. Never forget that when 20-40 people show up to a meeting and are against something; that is probably most of the opposition. There are 10,000 people in the county that are ok enough with the status quo.

• This same thing played out in Wheeler County when I moved there in 1977. The people in the Beaver Valley had essentially owned and controlled everything in the county for close to 100 years. Without irrigation, it was the most valuable land in the county. In fact, when my father left the county in 1960 and moved north of Stuart, he didn’t think it would ever change. When I moved back there in 1977 and put pivots on ground that previously would only support a few head of cattle, it bothered a lot of people who were used to running the county. When I left in 2000, one company was paying over 20% of all the taxes collected in the county. Pivots are the main reason there is anything and anyone left to support the school and other services.

The Planning Commission has approached the commissioners with regulations on three potential industries.

• Wind generation is very likely going to keep developing, no matter any single individual perception of its value. This is potentially one of the best growth industries for the rest of this century. We have been given the potential to be a hub for that industry. My mind won’t let me fathom how we could possibly pass up that opportunity.

• The ethanol plant was, and is, a huge contribution to the community. Now, because of government requirements, they are forced to change their operations. It is simply an extension of the whole climate change world that the powers that be have decided we have to comply with. Even if I smile, and I do, at what Mother Nature must think of our attempts to change the climate, it is what it is. It is just as foolish for us to stick our heads in the sand and tell ourselves that we want no part of it. If you are paying attention at all, the cattle industry is next on the list of things the elites on the coasts are trying to eliminate.

Before you drive out the opportunities, you might want to see what we’ll be left with, if you’re successful.

• This country is covered with pipelines, and it has been amazing that people have gotten so upset over something as benign as a CO2 pipeline. We used CO2 in the greenhouse every day. If the stories that people related at the previous commissioner meeting were true, we would have all been dead. We didn’t put our CO2 lines on the ceiling so the CO2 would drift down to the plants, we put them on the floor so the plants could use that before it dissipated into the air. We monitored those levels continuously. In 2010, 386 ppm was the rate you and I breathed every day. One time, we had a line break in the night and pumped, literally, a whole semi load of compressed CO2 into a 10-acre area of the greenhouse. In a closed building, the amount reached 15,000 ppm. We opened the windows, and with no other ventilation, it was back down to normal levels in two hours. Had this not been in a confined area, it would have dissipated before it was even detected. The so-called research, that some people sent to me after the meeting, says the deadly level is somewhere around 40,000 ppm. A two-inch high-pressure hose in a closed building couldn’t even get the levels to one-third of that in almost eight hours. If it truly sank and pooled like some suggested, then with the incredible tonnage the ethanol plant puts out, everyone in and around the plant would be dead. It simply does not act like that.

• The next thing the planning commission wanted to stop (“not stop” they said, but to “protect the people that don’t want development”), was any large solar farm. Besides the obvious question of why the heck you would need any controls on such an industry, I asked why you would possibly need a mile setback from any house for a solar farm? The answer was, well we had to put something down. It appears that this was the same psychology that drove most of the proposed regulations. They want the regulations stringent enough to deter anyone from even attempting any new development.

Do you, as commissioners, really want to spend our tax dollars defending what has to be a shaky argument, at best, if you pass these totally arbitrary and capricious rules?

• We don’t have many resources in this part of the world that we can turn into dollars. What we do have is water, sunshine and wind. It can all be safely used. We also have a fourth resource - people - who still know how to work, but only if we quit chasing them out for lack of opportunities. I brought the tomato plant here because I could turn water and sunshine into a marketable product.

• I hope people don’t get angry at the combines and tractors that take up more than the whole road, causing us to have to wait until they get to a corner or to the field they need to get to. We need to remember, if we do not accommodate the needs of businesses in our community, the roads and bridges would not need to be there. Without business income, there is no need for schools or roads, because no one will be here if there are no jobs.

• A very large percentage of people in this community earn their livelihood from some entity of government. In the mobile world we live in today, it is not a stretch that some of those positions may go away, because we can simply operate online. And they will certainly go away if there is no population to support them. Who would have guessed, even one generation ago, how fast the world would change? There are very few things that I do in the courthouse or even most businesses, that I could not do on-line. This county and the towns in it can die, just like any other. I was told an old Holt County map shows 68 communities at the start of the 20th century. Now, less than 10. When I went to school in Stuart, I believe the population sign said 880 people. What is it now, less than 600? When I was in high school in Atkinson there were over 300 kids in four high school grades. Now, not many more than that in 13 grades. We need to have all the private businesses in town we can, so we can continue to enjoy the rural life we claim to enjoy so much.

No one knows what one business will bring to town.

It may cause someone else to start something related to that, and on and on.

• Although we may not agree with what progress is, most change looks better through the rear-view mirror. But it won’t look good if we keep the picture empty.

• Even if there needs to be some cost involved, it will never approach the number of economic dollars that are going to be lost if these developments leave, or don’t come in the first place. Economics 101 says dollars turn seven times in a community. Development is the mechanism that subsidizes the property taxes everyone complains, are too high. Amy Shane has previously related to you the millions of dollars that the wind industry has generated for the school in tax dollars; dollars that didn’t have to come from everyone’s house and farm taxes.

And, that is just the tip of the iceberg.

• Most importantly, with these arbitrary regulations, you are not just running businesses out of town and the county. You are telling any other potential business that might have considered coming here, please do not do so, because someone will always be against your development, and a few vocal minority voices that want things to stay like 1950 will rise up and chase you away. I would sincerely ask you to stop and think about the damage you will do to the town and county if you refuse to work with what these industries need to operate.

• You are NOT protecting the taxpayers; you are killing them.

• They don’t need us, nearly as much as we need them.

• This literally can and will affect you for years to come. If you don’t want a large piece of your county zoned “dead” to any development, you need to contact your commissioner and let them know.

Thank you very much for your time and consideration of this important matter.

Marv Fritz, Holt County resident Pd. Adv.