The Leelanau County Board of Commissioners approved 6-1 a request by the county’s Energy Futures Task Force to write a Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE) grant that could provide up to $100,000 for a “county-wide energy survey.”
“The Leelanau County Energy Futures Task Force wants to represent all county residents as we move forward with mandated more environmental energy coming from renewable and green sources,” county commissioner and Energy Futures Task Force member Kama Ross explained.
Ross said that the survey would come at no cost to the county. If EGLE awards the county a grant, Ross said they would recruit graduate students from the University of Michigan’s Environment and Sustainability College to conduct the survey. Once completed, the survey findings would be made publicly available.
“(The survey) will help guide our group as we go forward looking for ways that we can help our citizens and the county be more energy efficient and more dependent on renewable and green energy as we go into the future,” Ross said.
All county commissioners except Melinda Lautner voted “aye” on authorizing the task force to prepare the grant application, to be presented at the board’s next executive session on June 11 and possibly approved the following Tuesday.
Discussion on this new grant application was nearly overshadowed by comments earlier in the meeting. During the first public comment period at Tuesday night’s meeting, a woman identifying herself as Patty Lesch of Northport alleged that Energy Futures Task Force Chairman Joe DeFors “should be removed from the task force for seeking personal gain in his position.”
As evidence of her claim, Lesch cited the Michigan Public Service Commission (MPSC) grant application presented by the task force and approved by the county board of commissioners back on Feb. 20. The application is still under review, but if approved by the MPSC, it could grant the county over $1.5 million to build solar arrays at the government center’s Suttons Bay campus.
As part of the process, applicants needed to include a budget narrative for each partnering organization or subcontractor that would work on the project. There is a line item for a “project leadership team,” consisting of DeFors and fellow task force member Russ Packard, who will share a salary of $45 an hour for an estimated three hours of work per week.
The grant application says that DeFors and Packard “researched, interviewed, planned, designed and coordinated all activities required to construct this grant application (and) rather than making an effort to transfer this broad and complex network structure of established relationships to a new project manager, it is deemed more efficient and effective to, when necessary, call upon the original individuals already in place.”
Lesch said that this $45 an hour salary represents a confl ict of interest for DeFors and called on the board of commissioners to conduct an “ethical violation investigation,” further saying that commissioners Ross and Gwenne Allgaier should be recused from this investigation because they “had knowledge of and were complicit in the ethical violation.”
Since the county board amended their rules of order and procedure in August, board Chairman Ty Wessell has been asking audience members to limit their comments to items on the meeting agenda during the first public comment period.
After Lesch was done speaking, Allgaier noted that Lesch’s comment was not related to any item on the evening’s meeting agenda but was regarding a grant application that had been approved three months ago.
Wessell appeared to agree, and asked commenters to wait until the second comment public comment period at the end of the meeting — a request that was ignored at first as several other audience members sought to comment on DeFors and the solar array grant application, leading the chairman to call a brief recess to restore order.
When they reconvened and considered the task force’s new grant application later in the meeting, several commissioner comments referenced DeFors. Ross, who serves on the task force alongside Allgaier and Melinda Lautner, vouched for DeFors and said that a salary in the budget narrative is normal.
“There is no ethical problem with what (DeFors) is doing,” Ross said. “It is pretty standard that when you receive $1.5 million, there has to be some oversight of the grant. Since he is the most knowledgeable person on that team, he is one person who is going to be receiving a small stipend to help us make sure the project is carried out according to the grant requirements, our county, the lawyers, all that.”
Lautner didn’t mention during Tuesday’s meeting that she is an Energy Futures Task Force member herself. Indeed, she had requested that the board of the commissioners expand the task force from 12 to 14 members in September so that she could also serve on it, though she’s admitted to the newspaper that she’s only attended “one and a half” of their meetings.
Lautner did, however, say that Lesch’s allegations of ethical violations and the alleged Michigan Open Meetings Act (OMA) violations by the task force were “very concerning.”
Lautner also claimed that she “tried to ask (Lesch’s) questions at that time” at the board’s February regular session, but that DeFors talked over her, and Chairman Wessell didn’t intervene.
Lautner was referencing a complaint from another Northport resident, Gary Hosking, who alleged that the task force wasn’t posting meeting notices and minutes in violation of the OMA. The Michigan State Police is investigating allegations that the task force violated the OMA.
Regarding this, Allgaier noted that county attorney Matt Nordfjord said last week that the task force is not a “public body” bound by the OMA.
The newspaper reached out to DeFors for comment the morning after the board regular session, but he did not respond before this edition went to print.
