The Newberry City Commission directed staff on Monday to transmit a letter to the School Board of Alachua County (SBAC), signed by the mayor and containing recommendations for rezoning plans. The commission also continued a public discussion with Florida Renewable Partners over a solar farm coming to town. 

The letter to the school board is to include recommended boundary adjustments that would more closely match Newberry’s corporate boundaries. It is also to contain a recommendation that the school board implement impact fees to help generate funding for new school capacity. 

This will be the first official input Newberry has provided in the school board’s rezoning process, though Mayor Jordan Marlowe said he has attended every community input session this fall to tell the SBAC that Newberry would rather work out its overcrowding as a community, without the students bused in from places like Jonesville and Gainesville. 

“My position has always been that Newberry residents’ children have first dibs on Newberry seats,” Marlowe said in the meeting. 

All of Newberry’s schools are over capacity, but Marlowe pointed to a 2016 study that says only 60% of Newberry Elementary School students come from Newberry, and only 40% of Newberry High School is made up of Newberry residents. 

The mayor said even a slight change in the zone boundaries could have a significant impact on the overcrowding, but while the board and superintendent have told him they would take his feedback into account the maps have not reflected such change. 

The SBAC finished community input sessions in October, and proposed rezoning maps have made it through a first hearing and public comment. A second hearing has been pushed from December to January, and while the proposed maps are supposed to be flexible up until that date, district staff stopped revising them for some time to work on studying the financial impact of rezoning. 

The Jan. 15 second reading vote is precarious, as multiple school board members have expressed dissatisfaction with the current maps’ effectiveness, stating that they will push the timeline further if they need to. 

The commission also received a presentation from Florida Renewable Partners (FRP) about a solar farm in its early stages, which prompted the city to begin rethinking its solar regulations in October. 

The presentation did not require any action from the commission, but it addressed some concerns residents have previously brought to the city. 

Residents’ prevailing concern is the aesthetic nature of the solar farm, which they are worried will disrupt the open space of surrounding farmland visually and auditorily. 

FRP project director Scott Scovill said the solar panels are only about 6.5 feet tall and make very little noise. Commissioners Mark Clark and Tony Mazon agreed on the noise point, saying they have recently visited solar farms and the buzzing is a low-level sound, drowned out by passing cars. Scovill said the sound should be eliminated by the time it reaches the property line. 

Some confusion remains around whether a solar farm would generate an electromagnetic field that could affect defibrillators or pacemakers. Scovill said electromagnetic fields are found commonly in nature and in homes, but a resident provided the commission with studies he said cause him to doubt the safety of a solar farm. 

According to Scovill, FRP will leave the surrounding roads in a condition equal to or better than how they were when the company arrived, and 97% of the solar farm materials are recyclable. 

Scovill said the project will be beneficial to the city in multiple ways, including about $7 million in tax revenue over its lifetime, about 200 jobs at peak construction, which FRP is committed to hiring locally, and 24/7 security that will benefit neighbors. 

The project is barely in its beginning stages, as FRP only bought the land in March and a tenant is currently running cattle on it. Scovill said he hopes to bring an application to the commission in one or two years. 

An existing energy agreement with Duke Energy prevents FRP from energizing the site for at least another four years, but residents said in public comment that they think it is good to be discussing the project this early. Some mentioned that it is not too early to begin putting in juvenile plants for a vegetative buffer, allowing them to grow before the site is under construction.