The Indiana Court of Appeals handed down a decision this week on an appeal by Mammoth Solar concerning a judge’s ruling that an application for a special exception for a 4,511 acre solar farm approved by the Pulaski County Board of Zoning Appeals was not correctly approved.
The application was presented to the BZA in 2020 and later approved after a public hearing. Several landowners who reside in close proximity to the proposed solar farm
filed a petition for judicial review asking the trial court to enter an order reversing the BZA’s decision and denying the application.
According to court documents, the trial court with Special Judge Kim Hall concluded that the application had failed to comply with the minimum requirements of the county’s Unified Development Ordinance, and that the BZA should not have considered or acted on Mammoth Solar’s incomplete application. By not complying with the requirements, the trial court found that the BZA’s actions were not in accordance with the law. As a result, the trial court vacated all actions taken on Mammoth Solar’s application and remanded the matter to the BZA.
Mammoth Solar appealed the decision, arguing that the Petitioners lack standing to challenge the BZA’s approval of the application, the challenge to the BZA’s approval of the application was not timely, the BZA’s approval of the application was not arbitrary and capricious, and the petitioners failed to demonstrate they had been prejudiced by the BZA’s approval of the application.
However, the Court of Appeals affirmed the trial court’s decision finding that the petitioners had standing to challenge the approval by providing specific evidence during public hearings, the Petitioners filed challenge documents within a timely fashion, and that they were directly prejudiced by the BZA’s arbitrary and capricious approval of Mammoth Solar’s application, which failed to comply with the UDO’s application requirements.
