Soon Hutchinson residents might be able to go from owning three chickens to raising eight. However, the amount of roosters allowed in the backyard garden will not change − it will remain at zero. On Wednesday, the Hutchinson Planning Commission approved sending their recommendations on the amount of chickens a household may own to the Hutchinson City Council. The recommendations will go before the council for approval on May 16. “A maximum of eight chickens, as we discussed in our last discussion, may be kept in the side or rear yard,” said David Inskeep, a commission member. When the property is [...]

Douglas County commissioners on Wednesday deferred their decision on whether an energy firm may conduct testing for a potential large-scale solar project, and they and some members of the public were skeptical about the company’s claims that it didn’t know it needed a permit. The commission’s meeting room at the Douglas County Courthouse was packed full of residents on Wednesday night, many of whom came to speak out against industrial-scale solar energy projects in general. But the county leaders were specifically deciding whether to approve four permits for Florida-based NextEra Energy Resources to conduct utility-scale solar-related testing activity on seven properties [...]