The Dane County Board of Supervisors Thursday approved a resolution urging Midcontinent Grid Solutions and the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin to provide more opportunities for public input on the proposed BECI high-voltage transmission project.
The resolution states that the public feedback timeline, which included a single open house for Dane and Dodge counties before the now-expired Sept. 7 deadline, failed to give people enough time to evaluate possible routes and their effects.
BECI is a proposed 190-mile, 765-kilovolt transmission line across parts of Wisconsin, including Crawford, Dane and Walworth counties.
The board is calling for an independent analysis to prove the project’s necessity for Wisconsin and a more detailed report on costs and benefits to ratepayers.
“A project of this scale deserves a level of scrutiny and public input that the current timeline simply does not allow,” County Board Chair Patrick Miles said in a press release.
“Dane County is far from alone in this concern,” he said. “Counties all along the proposed route share these questions, and residents, landowners, and local governments across the region need real time information to understand what this project would mean for their property, their farmland, and their communities before any decision is made.”
