Good evening and welcome to the legislative committee meeting on Monday, January 12th, 2026 at 5 p.m.

in the council chambers in the past courthouse.

Please silence all electronic devices and remove all hats.

This meeting is called to order with a silent prayer and the pledge of allegiance.

One nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all.

I would like to thank everyone for uh attending.

So matters before the council tonight, excuse me, before the committee.

2026 0017, a discussion regarding code revisions as it pertains to solar farms and their potential locations.

So I'm gonna hand it over to Councilman Pilier to get us up to date on uh some of the things that he has found, and in your package, you will also see copies of spreadsheets and some of the work that he has done, and I'll let him take it over from there.

Councilman P.

Uh, thank you.

Chairman Thank you, Chairman.

Uh actually, Mr.

Daniels has a preamble to discuss before we move into it.

I appreciate we could start there.

Thank you.

So, Daniels, would you like to go?

Is that an option?

Okay.

All right.

Everyone should have in their packet an introductory statement that I prepared a couple weeks prior to us actually um sitting down and talking about some of the options with regard to the solar panel ordinance in place.

And essentially, what this is trying to say is that generally speaking, we have regulated heavily in the state of Louisiana oil and gas and some other items.

Um alternative energy has been uh on the forefront of our legislature as well as um local um you know local interests, and one of those things happens to be solar, in which um in 2023, um councilwoman Lysandra Gordon saw this as an issue, and um the planning and zoning department um realized that we needed to put some kind of ordinances in place in advance of these projects possibly coming to the state as well as into the parish.

So we do have um some ordinances and they're um but for the most part uh very well written and um and they work well with the changes that have happened in the legislature as well as our local um our I guess our neighboring parishes that were watching to see what's happening.

But tonight we're gonna talk about maybe making some uh changes and some updates to these ordinances.

So the ordinances uh tucked in section seven of appendix A entitled Supplemental Use and Performance Regulations Large Solar Energy Systems, and they're subject to additional regulatory requirements, and I provided the pages there in case you wanted to ref refer to your code.

But the purpose of this meeting is to revisit these requirements, examine them in the context of the developing state regulatory scheme, and update these requirements to comport with regulations that are fair to all parties, but also protective of the parish's health, welfare, and safety.

Um in this legislative hearing, I'd like to talk about three different data points.

One, the state legislation, two, the parish of Tanjibahoa's solar regulations, which are considered some of the strictest regulations in the state at this time, as well as uh St.

Charles Parish uh solar regulations.

There are two state regulations that we are going to be talking about and can the first one is gonna be um Louisiana revised statute 301154, which is Act 555 of the 2022 regular legislative session.

That one has been in flux and they're in the rulemaking status right now.

I believe those rules should be finalized in January and come out in Louisiana Digest.

They have not come out yet.

These have to do with permitting at the state level for 10 acres or more, and it's basically looking at um to footprint to some extent, but mostly about decommissioning and financial um uh financial uh supports for the decommissioning, more concerned about what's gonna happen once a solar panel farm is uh finished.

And so the state does not want to be left uh with a whole bunch of van and farms.

They've come in and decided to make rulemaking here.

So we're gonna skip over the decommissioning.

We do have some decommissioning within our ordinance, but for tonight we're gonna concentrate on siding, which was addressed in Act 279 of the 2025 regular legislative session, and now it's codified Louisiana revised statute 301144.

This is effective January 2026.

It addresses the siding of a solar farm.

Uh St.

Charles Parish has indicated regulation, local regulations appropriate for footprints of 10,000 square feet and up in our current uh ordinance, which we adopted as a local resolution last year.

The state regulation of facility siding does not apply until the footprint is 75 acres or more.

So we're here to discuss whether we want to adjust the um uh facility siding regulations, and we'll go through those in um we'll go through those in categories really quickly.

So the parish does have the regul of the ability to regulate, and we confirm legal as well that, but there's significant gaps in the state regulatory framework, and we're here tonight to just have a high level discussion of those particular um categories and see what everybody's thoughts are on those.

The first category is lot size.

As I stated earlier, the minimum lot size in our ordinance today is 10,000 uh square feet, which makes pretty much no sense in the solar farm uh world.

Um we've had several discussions uh Mr.

Pele and I, as well as legal and planning and zoning, to discuss a minimum lot size in conjunction with what we want our buffers to look like.

Now, currently our buffers are 30 feet, and we're looking at possibly extending those and having a 300 foot buffer around the solar farm, which is not as much as Tanjibahoa, but consistent with the state uh regulations in the state statute.

So lot size with that, and I think uh Mr.

Pele can address the minimum lot size and how that would be adjusted because of the proposed 300 foot buffer.

Um councilman Pele, would you like to address that issue about lot size?

Uh yes, I I took uh I took a square of certain sizes and I looked at acreage versus the width and length, and then what uh remaining space that we would uh we'd have as a result of the 300 foot setback.

Also looked at the 30 foot setback, which we currently have, which we I personally I don't I don't favor the 30-foot setback, uh that's you know less than the edge of the building back here, and uh 300 is what uh you know the state proposed Tangent Bahoa 500.

I didn't look at that, I think that's a bit excessive probably given the space that you'd need to put something on.

But it turns out that until you get to about 10 acres, you really don't have any space with a 300 foot buffer to put any equipment just by virtue of the buffer size.

So once you get to 10 acres, which happens to agree with some of the other state regulations, and uh even with Tangent Bahoa's regulation on the on the minimum size, you can actually do something.

I'm not gonna say it's huge, but you can do something.