By Mark Coddington
mark.coddington@theindependent.com

Then, for the second time since November, the commission recommended approval of the project by a wide margin, this time with a 7-2 vote Thursday night.

The dairy was rejected last month when the Buffalo County Board of Supervisors' 4-3 vote for approval fell short of a required two-thirds majority.

That margin was necessary because adjacent landowners filed a formal protest against the application.

But Ken, Ron, Dennis and Jerry Woitaszewski of Wood River filed a second application, which marked out a smaller tract of land within the original proposed site.

The Woitaszewskis own all of the land adjacent to that tract, eliminating the possibility of a formal protest, said Andy Hoffmeister, deputy Buffalo County attorney.

The operation would house 7,500 dairy cows in enclosed buildings southeast of Ravenna while using a methane digester to convert the manure into electrical power.

Wayne Goedken, executive director of Iowa agricultural project developer the Weihs Group, presented to the commission on Thursday a letter of intent for the project signed by representatives from his company, the Woitaszewskis, a renewable energy company and the nearby Abengoa Bioenergy ethanol plant.

The Woitaszewskis' representatives presented little other new information on Thursday, other than plans to spray much of the "gray" material left over from the manure-digesting process through nearby pivots.

They said that many of the pivots and acres needed to apply that material were available on the Woitaszewskis' own land, but the project's detractors were unconvinced.

"You don't have the easements," Laura Krebsbach of Lincoln, a consultant who represented several nearby landowners, told the commission. "You don't have the proof that there are the acres to take the manure. And that's vital information."

Krebsbach and many of the nearly two dozen others who addressed the commission urged it to demand a manure-management plan to ensure that the manure would be properly disposed of, especially if the digester didn't work properly.

But several commissioners said their job was strictly to examine zoning regulations. Review of the manure-management plan, they said, was the job of the Nebraska Department of Environmental Quality, whose permit is required for the project to move forward.

"A management plan clearly is (the DEQ's) responsibility," Commissioner Leonard Skov said. "And probably we would just be confusing things if we tried to (regulate) that."