Crofoot beats Dirks to become commission chairman
Staff writer
On a 4-1 vote, county commissioners selected Dave Crofoot to be their chairman for 2026.
Commissioner Clarke Dirks also sought the position, but a vote to name him failed 2-2 with only Dirks and outgoing Chairman Jonah Gehring voting for him.
Dirks was the lone dissenting vote on a subsequent vote to select Crofoot.
Commissioner Kent Becker was elected vice chairman, and Dirks was voted to be the alternate in case both the chairman and vice chairman were absent.
County administrator Tina Spencer proposed having the vote by ballot, saying it was legal and offered an opinion saying so.
However, commissioners chose to have an open vote to avoid any confusion.
Commissioners also listened to former commissioner and wind farm opponent Dianne Novak about how the process to grant a permit for what is now Orsted’s Sunflower Wind granted to a company that sold the rights to Orsted, was flawed.
County consultant Russ Ewy ruled 34 protest petitions representing 58 people were filed. Only one of the petitions, Ewy determined, came from within 1,000 feet of the project. The rest, he said, were invalid and could not be counted toward the minimum 20% to require a unanimous vote of county commissioners to grant the conditional use permit, Novak said.
“Dianne would have voted no,” she said.
She told commissioners that project lead Christopher Bass with J. Fred Hambright Inc. Landman, found numerous inaccuracies or lapses in the Expedition Wind application and the official record of the county commissioners.
“A careful review of the shapefile Expedition Wind used as part of its application contained numerous inaccuracies that led Ewy to improperly calculate the results of the protest petition numbers,” Bass wrote.
With only one petition qualifying, protested property within the buffer was 6.12%. In July 2020, however, Bass and others said Ewy’s calculations were incorrect and the actual percentage protesting was 61.14%.
Opponents sued but the lawsuit was dropped before they could testify.
At The Jan. 12 meeting, packed mostly with wind farm opponents, Novak conceded that not much can be done to change what happened in 2019.
Afterward, Gehring complimented Novak on her presentation, telling her there were things in her comments he had not known.