The Secret Playbook Behind Effort to Kill Solar in an Ohio County — ProPublica

Word tends to spread fast in rural Knox County, Ohio. But misinformation has spread faster.

The first article in the Mount Vernon News last fall about a planned solar farm simply noted that residents were “expressing their concern.” But soon the county’s only newspaper was packed with stories about solar energy that almost uniformly criticized the project and quoted its opponents.

Then a new “grassroots” organization materialized and invited locals to an elaborate event billed as a town hall, with a keynote speaker who denied that humans cause climate change.

Someone sent text messages to residents urging them to “stop the solar invasion” and elect two county commission candidates who opposed the solar farm. And one day this past March, residents received an unfamiliar newspaper that contained only articles attacking Frasier Solar, a large project that would replace hundreds of acres of corn and soybeans with the equivalent of 630 football fields of solar panels.

To many in the deep-red central Ohio community, it seemed that solar had become the focus of news and politics. They were right. Fossil fuel interests were secretly working to shape the conversation in Knox County.

Each cog in the anti-solar machine — the opposition group, the texts, the newspaper, the energy publication — was linked to the others through finances and overlapping agendas, an investigation by Floodlight, ProPublica and The Tow Center for Digital Journalism found.

The campaign against solar power benefited from a confluence of two powerful forces funded by oil and gas interests. A former executive at Ariel Corporation, the county’s largest employer and one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of methane gas compressors, was working behind the scenes. And helping in a more public way is the Mount Vernon News, a newspaper now in the hands of Metric Media, which operates websites that reportedly engage in pay-to-play coverage.

Ariel and the former executive did not respond to requests for comment. Metric Media’s leader did not answer questions for this story; he has previously denied that his news outlets are partisan.

Across the country, the oil and gas industry and power companies have exploited a struggling news industry and a fraught political process to fight the transition to clean energy and maximize profits, Floodlight and its partners have reported. In Florida, two power companies paid a consulting firm to hire newspapers to attack a pro-solar politician. In Alabama, the state’s largest monopoly electric company purchased a historic Black newspaper, then didn’t write about soaring power bills. In California, Chevron launched its own newsroom when other papers shuttered; it doesn’t cover itself critically.

In Mount Vernon, a city of 17,000 where the local university named its new sports complex CH4 after the chemical formula for methane, a variety of tactics have been deployed simultaneously, creating an anti-solar echo chamber.

Residents are bombarded with dubious claims: Solar panels are toxic. Their construction depletes the soil and floods fields and depresses home values. China is using them to invade. The campaign has stoked their skepticism and ignited their passions. It intensified the debate in a conservative county that prizes its roots in the gas industry.

Bright yellow “No Industrial Solar” yard signs have sprung up everywhere, competing with a smattering of green “Yes Solar” ones. Citizens packed local government meetings. More than 4,000 public comments, both for and against, were filed with the state regulator that will decide if the solar project can be built — triple the number for any previous solar project in Ohio. And all those opinions have drowned out the voices of the nine landowners, mostly farmers, who’ve signed leases with Frasier’s developer and for whom a total of about $60 million is at stake.

“People are so radicalized and they’re not thinking clearly,” said Rich Piar, a third-generation farmer who hopes to secure his financial future by leasing a portion of his 1,650 acres to Open Road Renewables, the Texas-based company developing the Frasier Solar project.

Politicians who didn’t forcefully denounce the solar project were attacked in Mount Vernon News stories. Thom Collier, a long-serving Republican on the county commission who thinks landowners should be able to choose whether to use their property for solar infrastructure, ultimately lost his reelection bid after a barrage of misleading coverage about his stance on solar.

“I pin this on one or two people from Ariel and some close friends that they have,” Collier said of the anti-solar offensive. “They determined it didn’t matter how much money it would take, they were going to fight this and make it ugly, and they have.”

“They Want Everybody to Buy Gas”

Just 20 days after Knox Smart Development was registered as an LLC in Ohio, the anti-solar group hosted a town hall at a historic Georgian revival theater in Mount Vernon with 1,000 red velvet seats. Attendees were offered free food and alcohol.

The November 2023 event centered on a presentation from Steve Goreham, who argues global warming is natural and who is the author of several books, including “The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania.”

“When I think of a town hall meeting, I think of a meeting where everybody from the community can go, everybody has their say. That’s not how their meeting was,” said Kathy Gamble, who said organizers only reluctantly agreed to let her in. She’s pro-solar and not quiet about it.

The town hall established Knox Smart Development as a leading voice against the Frasier Solar project. The group calls itself a simple grassroots defender of Knox County.

It isn’t.

The man who registered the group as a business — and who is its sole member and spokesperson — was an Ariel Corporation employee two decades ago and remained an acquaintance of a top executive there, Tom Rastin. The group’s website was owned for a time by a woman working as an executive assistant at Ariel.

And one of Knox Smart Development’s larger funders is Rastin, a Republican megadonor and a retired executive vice president at Ariel, according to records and sworn testimony. Rastin’s father-in-law founded Ariel and, until recently, Rastin and his wife, Karen Buchwald Wright, led the company. Wright is still the chairman, and her son operates it now. Rastin and Wright did not respond to questions for this story.

The group’s founder, Jared Yost, said in an email that Rastin has not tried to steer its activism. “As a local resident, I believe he should be allowed to donate to whatever cause he aligns with, regardless of his former employment, and to state otherwise is to suggest Mr. Rastin should be censored,” Yost wrote in an email. He said the group relies on volunteers and “our intentions are genuine.”

He added: “The oil and gas industry is not involved in our fight.”

The town hall event headliner, Goreham, said he appeared as a favor to Rastin and Wright. In 2019, he had dinner with the couple when Goreham and his wife were passing through town from Illinois on a road trip to their second home in Virginia Beach. Goreham said that he and Rastin connected over their mutual feelings on the benefits of gas. He said he was glad to accept the invitation to speak at the anti-Frasier Solar event.

“First off, it’s in his county there. Mount Vernon is his city where he lives and where they are based,” said Goreham. “They’re pretty much opposed to renewables and they want everybody to buy gas. That’s their business.”

Goreham says he wasn’t paid to speak, but Wright bought 200 copies of his latest book, “Green Breakdown: The Coming Renewable Energy Failure,” which warns about a net-zero-emissions agenda that will cause energy grids to fail. Local officials were given copies of the book that included a personal note from Wright: “Hello! Given the significant misinformation surrounding solar and wind arrays, I bought you this book that really lays out the facts.” She signed the note “Karen Wright, Chairman — Ariel Corporation.”

Shortly after the group was formed, Knox Smart Development’s “No Solar” ads became a fixture on the Mount Vernon News website and in the paper.

“You Believe People”

The Mount Vernon News had been owned by the same family since 1939, and for decades it chronicled local doings from city council meetings to the county fair.

At its height in the early 2000s, before newspapers started hemorrhaging advertising revenue and readers, the News employed about 15 full-time local reporters. An orange Maine coon cat named Scoop roamed the newsroom.

But by 2020, the News was barely hanging on. Its reporters were still using clunky 20-year-old computers. The back wall of the building was falling down and needed $250,000 in repairs. Kay Culbertson, who owned both the paper and the building, said that she knew it was time to sell. Paying for the repairs would be impossible; even making payroll was a stretch.

An acquaintance of Culberston’s connected her with Metric Media, part of an eight-company network operating more than 1,100 online local news sites. These sites have been described by media researchers and journalists as “pink slime,” named for a filler in processed meat. The final product looks natural, but it’s been tampered with.

A Syracuse University researcher concluded in a journal article published in February that sites like Metric’s “that seem like original news outlets and that appeal to local identity are filling the void” left by the decline of local news. And The Washington Post reported last year that Republican campaigns requested customized news stories that appeared on Metric-owned sites.

Both conservative and liberal pink slime sites exist. But Metric is run by Brian Timpone, an Illinois-based former broadcast reporter who has contributed tens of thousands of dollars to conservative campaigns and causes. Timpone’s ventures have been criticized for using foreign-based writers to produce material. Some also have been accused of plagiarism and fabricating quotes. Timpone has blamed the problems on foreign writers providing content, and he apologized to readers.

Metric Media’s nonprofit arm has received $1.4 million “for general operations” from DonorsTrust, a dark-money group that has received significant funding from Charles and David Koch, who made their billions in oil pipelines and refineries. The eight-company network that Metric is part of also has ties to conservative billionaires, including oil-and-gas-industry titan Tim Dunn, shipping magnate Richard Uihlein and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. (Political groups that organize as nonprofits do not have to disclose donors, which is why they’re called “dark money.”)

DonorsTrust CEO and President Lawson R. Bader said in an email that the organization makes about 4,000 grants a year and that it does not dictate how those donations are spent.

Timpone responded to a request for an interview by writing, “We at the Mount Vernon News are now also working on a story — about Pro Publica and Floodlight’s efforts to promote taxpayer-funded ‘solar energy’ businesses in Central Ohio.” He did not respond to detailed questions.

But in interviews, he has said his business keeps local news alive when many outlets are scaling back or shutting down. Timpone told the Deseret News in Utah that his sites have no political leaning and are “data-driven and fact-centric.”

Research and news investigations have found that Timpone’s publications tend to champion conservative causes and politicians; they often are linked to mysterious newspapers distributed during key elections.

Culbertson and assistant publisher Liz Lutwick said in an interview that they knew little about Metric Media before the sale. But the company’s promises sounded good and, Lutwick said, “You believe people.”

“They were going to keep everything the same for a while. Lo and behold, they didn’t,” Culbertson said.

Metric paid at least $1 million for the Mount Vernon News, the first time it had purchased an established news organization printing a local paper. When the new owners visited the paper after the sale, they told the staff they’d stop printing every day and would no longer provide benefits; instead, employees would become contractors. Half the staff quit on the spot.

“It was awful. You feel like you’ve betrayed people,” Culbertson said.

“We Call It the Solar Times”

Today, the Mount Vernon News only publishes once a week and has no local reporters or photographers.

“It’s obvious when you read the stories, either they’re AI-generated or they’re written by somebody who’s sitting in an office in Chicago who has never been here,” said Bill Davis, a sports editor who said he worked at the paper from 2010 to 2019.

Since Metric took over, only 11% of stories credited the work to authors working for Metric or its sister companies. Most of what it publishes are press releases or content submitted by companies and community groups, according to an analysis by the Tow Center, ProPublica and Floodlight.

After the sale, residents said they could no longer get timely obituaries — people were buried by the time funeral announcements were published — but they could read a lot about endangered farmland and concerns that the sun’s reflection off solar panels could blind nearby pilots.

Even Mount Vernon’s mayor, who was once a sports reporter at the paper, said he stopped reading it. Tanner Salyers, a former Mount Vernon city council member who now oversees public safety for the city, said quality dropped after the sale. “Then Frasier kicked up and they were like, ‘No more news.’ We call it the Solar Times.”

Over the last 12 months, the paper has published at least 52 online news stories on solar energy — 42 of them about the Frasier proposal, the analysis found. Of the 40 print editions published this year, 17 have featured front-page stories about solar. And though the paper has occasionally run a pro-solar letter to the editor, nearly all of the stories slanted anti-solar, according to an analysis of coverage by Floodlight, ProPublica and the Tow Center.

The paper began publishing a weekly opinion column called “Afternoon TEA” — TEA being an acronym for The Empowerment Alliance, a dark-money gas advocacy group Rastin leads.

The columns extolled the superiority of gas as a fuel source.

It isn’t clear if The Empowerment Alliance paid the Mount Vernon News to run the “Afternoon TEA” columns. But tax filings show that since 2020 The Empowerment Alliance has spent at least $6.3 million on a “public education campaign,” which included publishing “Afternoon TEA.” The goal was to promote “the importance of natural gas to the economy and national energy independence.”

One of The Empowerment Alliance’s stated goals is “fighting the nonsense of turning corn fields into solar fields.” It has financed online advertisements attacking President Joe Biden’s energy policies and spearheaded an Ohio bill that defined gas as a “green” fuel source.

Half of the Frasier stories published in the Mount Vernon News over the past year have mentioned Knox Smart Development, the anti-solar group linked to Rastin. Articles often quoted people or cited work from a Koch-backed think tank, The Buckeye Institute, but did not interview Frasier or farmers willing to lease land to it.

The Buckeye Institute is part of the State Policy Network, a group of think tanks that has received millions in funding from organizations connected to the Koch family. Rastin’s wife has served as a director on the State Policy Network board, and in 2019 she gave it $700,000, according to a tax record that typically would’ve been redacted but was posted to a government site.

The Mount Vernon News and pro-gas political groups also were working to influence local elections. The text messages that boosted anti-solar candidates were from a conservative Ohio PAC tied to a group that ran a pro-gas campaign.

And, leading up to the primary, a newspaper called the Ohio Energy Reporter was mailed to Knox County homes. The 8-page paper reprinted several Mount Vernon News stories on solar and featured other articles with headlines including “Ohio’s coming ‘solar trash wave’” and “Could the Texas Power Crisis happen in Ohio?”

The publication did not disclose its owners. The Floodlight, ProPublica and Tow Center investigation used source code from the website, its IP address and business mailing addresses to confirm that it is a product of the wider Metric Media network.

The stories the Mount Vernon News published began undermining politicians who were seen as insufficiently anti-solar and boosting the profiles of solar power’s outspoken critics.

In one article, the News accused Mount Vernon Mayor Matthew Starr of bowing to “energy activists” and pledging to try to remove natural gas from the city. It was not true. Starr was furious and asked the editors to take down the article, but they would not.

And in nearly a dozen stories that mentioned Collier, the county commissioner who was later ousted, the paper consistently misused a comment he’d given about newly placed solar panels at the county jail to falsely insinuate he supported the Frasier project.

Collier was never interviewed for those stories. Yet the paper ran a story devoted entirely to anti-solar commissioner candidate Drenda Keesee, a megachurch pastor who’d never run for office before; the article said she had “emerged as a vocal opponent of solar projects encroaching on the community.” Keesee, whose property would border a portion of the solar site, was the only source in the story.

She won the primary against Collier and is unopposed in the November general election.

“You Can’t Eat Solar Panels”

For the community, the debate over solar has been passionate and persistent. What it hasn’t always been is civil. Yard signs have been stolen. Insults hurled. Middle fingers extended. Friendships frayed.

“Other than solar, we don’t have any problems with each other,” said Kathy Gamble, who runs the pro-solar group Knox County For Responsible Solar.

Many people in the community say they don’t view the debate through the lens of climate science or fossil fuels; they care about land rights and preserving rural life. Members of Preserve Knox County, an anti-solar group with several members whose land borders the proposed solar arrays, said they worry the solar project will scare off the sandhill cranes and bald eagles that visit their backyards.

Many members are distrustful of Biden’s renewable energy initiatives; they are staunch supporters of former President Donald Trump, who questions the scientific consensus that the climate is undergoing dangerous changes. They also don’t trust the solar developer’s promises to plant enough trees to block the panels from view. And they don’t want to lose the farmland that gives the area its agricultural identity.

“You can’t eat solar panels,” said Jim Boeshart, whose home would be adjacent to solar arrays.

Keith Strait, a farmer who lives not far from Boeshart, agreed: “Let’s face it,” he said, pointing at the ground, “They’re not making any more of this. There will be a time when there won’t be any farm left. Where’re you going to get your food from?”

The farmers who want to lease their land feel their voices have been lost in the debate. For them, a 40-year land contract with Frasier Solar would be steady income. One farmer said he could make four times as much money per acre leasing to the solar project as he’d make renting to another farmer.

Rich Piar, the third-generation farmer, is looking to the solar panels as a retirement plan. He said he has no one to take over the operation when he retires, and he doesn’t think anyone should dictate what he does with his land or when he stops farming.

“Most farmers’ exit strategy is their health,” Piar said. “I don’t want to have that kind of predetermined exit strategy.” He went to one of the public meetings about Frasier but said it was so packed he didn’t get to speak until almost midnight.

In August, the Ohio Power Siting Board, which will rule on whether the project can be built, held a final hearing to accept evidence from both sides. One of the attorneys who spoke on behalf of a farmer who is leasing land for the project was from the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. (The Tow Center also is based at Columbia, but its work is separate.)

Frasier lawyers cross-examined Knox Smart Development spokesperson Jared Yost at the hearing, where he testified that Rastin, the retired Ariel executive, was one of the group’s biggest donors. To Open Road Renewables’ vice president of development, Craig Adair, the confirmation pierced the veil.

Everything changed, Adair said in an interview, “when The Empowerment Alliance decided to use its vast financial resources” to shape the debate in Knox County and in the Mount Vernon News.

The News published two stories on the hearing but did not mention the public admission of Knox Smart Development’s ties to Rastin, the Ariel Corporation and The Empowerment Alliance.

The board’s decision is likely to take months.

In the meantime, construction has started at the old Mount Vernon News building, which is being turned into an academic hub for a local university. The building will be named after Rastin’s stepson, a former president of Ariel Corporation.