AN OPEN LETTER TO GOVERNOR WES MOORE

Re: The Failure of Maryland's Community Solar Policy

Wes Moore

Governor of Maryland

State House, 100 State Circle

Annapolis, MD 21401

Governor Moore,

In a matter of days, more than 1,100 residents of Jarrettsville and the surrounding farming communities of northern Harford County signed a petition opposing the conversion of agricultural land into industrial solar facilities. 1,100 signatures, almost overnight, from a rural community that the General Assembly was told would benefit from your renewable energy agenda.

This is not isolated opposition. It is a referendum.

Your administration championed and signed the Renewable Energy Certainty Act of 2025, stripping counties of meaningful zoning authority over utility-scale and community solar siting. You promised it would accelerate Maryland's clean energy future. What it has actually done is hand Maryland's most finite strategic resource, our farmland, to out-of-state developers, while telling the families who live next to these projects that their voices no longer matter at the only level of government close enough to hear them.

In my community’s case, that developer is Navisun LLC, an entity carrying:

• A federal Clean Water Act settlement with the U.S. EPA;
• A judicial finding of gross negligence in Massachusetts;
• A likely sale to another out-of-state energy firm, casting doubt on who will actually own and operate the facility once it is built and our neighbors are left to live with it.

This is the type of operator your legislation invites onto 45 acres of Harford County farmland, over the documented objection of the surrounding community and sitting members of the Harford County Council. Maryland PSC Case No. 9874 is now the proving ground for whether the Certainty Act's preemption can survive an organized rural opposition. It will not.

We the people demand the following:

1. A public response from your office addressing the collapse of community-input safeguards in the Renewable Energy Certainty Act.
2. Repeal, or, at minimum, comprehensive amendment, of the provisions preempting county-level siting authority over community and utility-scale solar.
3. A moratorium on Public Service Commission approval of community and utility-scale solar applications sited on prime agricultural land, until the General Assembly revisits this law in the 2027 session.

You won 44% of the vote in Harford County in 2022 by speaking to working families and rural Maryland. 1,100 of those families have now told you, in writing, in days, with verified signatures, that this policy is a betrayal of that constituency.

The clean energy transition does not require the destruction of Maryland's farmland or the silencing of its rural communities. It requires a Governor strong enough to acknowledge when a law has failed the people it was promised to serve.

We are organized. We are documented. And we are watching, as voters.

We expect your timely response.

Respectfully,

Mark Kamyszek

Jarrettsville, MD 21084

On behalf of 1,100+ petition signatories