The town of Clymer is continuing to work on figuring out fees for building permits for the two ongoing solar projects. P-J photo by Sara Holthouse

CLYMER — Two solar projects being done in the town of Clymer have reached the building permit stage, leading town board members to discuss the projects’ permit fees.

At the December meeting, Town Supervisor Brian Willink said Code Enforcement Officer Jeff Messenger has been getting questions about building permits from both companies doing the projects as both have started seeing some activity again.

“Both projects have been approved through the town board for a special use permit and now they’re getting to where they want to apply for the actual building permit,” Willink said.

One project had “screeched to a halt” for a bit, but Willink said over the last few weeks work has begun on it again. He had heard reports from the developers that there had been some staffing changes on the project, leading to the slow down, but now that they are back to full staff they went back to it. Additionally, he said this now means the town has to work on the building permit stage, saying that they worked with town attorney Joel Seachrist and Rebecca Minis from the engineering firm on the special use permit and they can now do that again with the building permit.

“That’s kind of Jeff’s responsibility, but in our current building permits there’s nothing really about solar,” Willink said. “As Jeff mentioned in the last meeting, his basic map shows how many square feet of area that it was and the fee applies accordingly at 10 cents per square foot, that’s $67,000 in fees that we would be charging, which is probably a little absorbent. If you just take the actual panels themselves, that’s a smaller number.”

Willink said he had shared with the town board some other options that other municipalities do and that those amounts are all over the map. He added that Messenger indicated that the developers were agreeable to the smaller amount that just used the panels themselves, which was around $17,000. Willink has reached out to both Seachrist and Minis about what other towns are doing but that is at a standstill because of the holidays.

“I guess my thought is it’s easier to do it on a flat megawatt base than try to figure out square footage,” Willink said. “Especially going forward, with these projects if we get more down the line I’ve got to think the footprint is going to be smaller, and with a smaller footprint you’re going to have a smaller building fee. If you do it per megawatt it’s a fixed amount and off you go.”

The town agreed to think some more over the holidays and bring it up again at the January meeting. How the developers can submit their plans and project details was also brought up, and Willink said there will be more on that in January as well.