Amicus Brief

My name is Virginia Macha. I grew up, in my younger years, in Treece, Kansas a mining town. They mined zink. My teen years were spent in Columbus, Kansas. Columbus is located in the valley of strip mines that mined coal. I witnessed at a very young age the faces of poverty, despair, and hopelessness, and what it looks like when a once proud community is taken to the ground and destroyed in order to acclimate the water and land.

What I have learned above all things in these last four years. Is that your land, ownership of property, is the one factor that secures your First Amendment, your Second Amendment, and every constitutional right we have here in America. I realized without a voice to help these people find the courage, there will be no hope. And when hope fades, so does freedom.

My background is engineering. I have a chemistry degree as well as a master’s in environmental engineering. My experience began with a 96 mile long, 345 kilovolt interconnect to transmission line that was about to stretch across southeast Kansas. That’s 1.6 million acres of precious southeast Kansas land. The danger of not knowing what is about to be placed across our land, and the impact it will have environmentally, is daunting.

Millions of photovoltaic solar panels will turn fertile farm ground into desert, impacting millions of acres of prime farm ground is one thing, but it will be the generational farms that they destroy.

Most counties will fall upon hard times because of the property tax abatements, the tax credits handed to them by the legislature, and that burden will fall upon those taxpayers that remain in the county.

Towns will dry up and agriculture will become a piece of history here in Kansas.

The hundreds of stories that have been laid upon my plate, the pleas for help from property owners to have some kind of resolve has been what has driven me across the state, and I will keep going because I believe our freedom is at risk.

It will come at a high cost.

I ask this court to realize the magnitude and the consequences every Kansan will pay when our state is covered in industrial, solar, industrial wind, and battery storage that will be bring on an unknown threat to our prairies.

By not addressing the environmental factors, by not addressing the quality of life that will lessen for many and the local economies of small towns that will dry up it will be the demise of rural Kansas. It will leave a scar upon our state that will never heal. And that is why I will ask this court to give us a time out. Let Kansas get a energy plan together that will fit all Kansans. This is about freedom that will dim forever if we don’t find some resolve.

And that is why it matters to me. And it matters to thousands of Kansans that have stood by me, that are looking for someone to stand up for them.

Thank you very much for allowing me to address the court.