Feds and a country music star slam Gov. Hochuls push to blanket upstate NY farmland with solar energy panels: On-brand elitism

Gov.Kathy Hochul’s support of sprawling solar energy fields in rural upstate New York has caught the ire of three federal agencies — and one country music star — who are demanding answers about the state’s “rush” to approve projects “without fully accounting for their long term costs.” USDA Sec.

Brooke Rollins and EPA Chief Lee Zeldin, along with country singer John Rich, have co-signed a letter skewering the Hochul administration’s industrialization of prime farmland for solar energy complexes while potentially strapping costs to rural communities.“Nothing is more insulting to hardworking New Yorkers than Albany politicians who think they know it all and enthusiastically override local control and railroad local communities,” Zeldin told The Post.“The recent actions of Hochul and her allies to force upstate communities to take on the burden of far more solar farms on agricultural land is on-brand elitism that New Yorkers have grown to despise.”Zeldin, a former congressman from Long Island, said the letter aims to get “answers from Hochul about her heavy-handed steamrolling over America’s most productive farmland.”The inquest follows The Post’s exclusive reporting on communities across the state that are outraged by the projects — saying they are not only a blight on the landscape but also present economic and environmental catastrophe.Local residents have been blocked from discussions about the projects and only offered performative town hall meetings with developers, they told The Post.Meanwhile, a third federal agency, the Small Business Administration (SBA) has joined the dogpile, alarmed by “regulatory arbitrage” against small-time farmers.“New York has two-and-a-half-million small businesses and we’re watching a state apparatus go against these small businesses in favor of 18 large solar farms that are going to only raise the cost of operating for those … small businesses, which employ nearly half of New York’...