The latest economic development parade has arrived in Marion County wearing a green cloak solar farms glittering across old timber fields, and vast, windowless server fortresses promising the digital future. Officials beam before cameras, calling it progress. But anyone who’s lived through textile decline, paper‑mill pollution, or industrial abandonment can smell another cycle of subsidy and cleanup coming a mile away.
Solar developers sweep through county councils dangling the word sustainable like a charm against scrutiny. Behind the scenes, the contracts they secure Fee In Lieu of Tax (FILOT) agreements gut local tax revenues for decades.
Those rows of panels create fewer jobs than a gas station and generate a fraction of the property taxes of the farmland they replace. Yet the county shoulders the long‑term cost: dismantling contaminated hardware 25 years from now when the corporations that built them have long since dissolved.
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