NEW SCOTLAND — The New Scotland Zoning Board of Appeals recently issued a positive SEQR declaration for a proposed large-scale solar array on Bullock Road, triggering an in-depth review of the project.

The positive State Environmental Quality Review Act declaration, passed at the Nov. 23 meeting, means the board thought that the 4.2-megawatt solar proposal would have had an adverse environmental impact. 

Seaboard Solar, the project’s developer, now has to prepare an Environmental Impact Statement — an in-depth review — that will, among other things, identify ways to reduce or avoid adverse environmental impacts. 

The plan is for the draft statement to be handed into the board by the end of December, to have it available for the public to view and offer comment on for the following month, and to hold a public hearing on the project on Jan. 25.  

Seaboard is seeking two variances from town code. 

New Scotland’s solar law prohibits large-scale solar facilities from being sited on land containing prime soils — Seaboard is proposing to disturb about 4,600 square feet. And town code doesn’t allow solar on a site if it contains more than one acre of mature forest — the developer is now looking to take down about 34 acres of trees. 

The board has been skeptical of the project since it was first presented, in April. 

“I think you heard a lot of strong concerns from the members of the board regarding the amount of mature forest that’s being proposed to be taken here,” Chairman Jeffrey Baker, referring to the board’s April meeting, said to representatives from Seaboard Solar at the May meeting.

In April, Seaboard had proposed a 5-megawatt ground-mounted solar array with and asked to chop down over 41 acres of mature forest.

Seaboard retooled that proposal.

In May, the company presented the board with a 4.2-megawatt system while shrinking the acreage it intended to fell for the proposed site to 34 acres. In addition, Seaboard said it would preserve a separate 43-acre property (now 55 total acres, according to September meeting minutes) near the intersection of New Scotland and Crow Ridge roads. 

During the September meeting, Baker, according to the minutes, told representatives from the company, “You have a really tough hill to climb on this one. Some of it is, you know it’s a question, the mitigation that you are offering, I think you are aware is the general rule of thumb on environmental mitigation for resource mitigation is at least a 2 to 1 offset, if not a 3 to 1. You are at 1.25, so that is one thing, because you know before we are getting into the relative value and habitat and everything else that is being done.”

Baker was also skeptical about the land being preserved in exchange for the land where trees are to be chopped down. “We are not giving you something that is worthless from an environmental standpoint,” said Mark Sweeney, the developer’s attorney, according to meeting minutes. 

Baker, an attorney by trade, also noted the size of the variance request, according to the minutes; He stated, in his 30-plus of practice, he’d never seen one “33 times the amount or the limit that is in the code.”