WENDELL — The state Land Court has upheld the state attorney general’s rejection of a bylaw that was proposed as a way of dealing with the licensing of battery energy storage systems, including those powered by lithium-ion batteries.
No Assault & Batteries, the grassroots group that penned the proposed bylaw, had in January 2025 sued Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell after her office rejected the submitted language for failing to comply with procedural safeguards embedded into state zoning laws. Group members intend to meet in the near future to discuss next steps.
Wendell residents voted 100 to 1 at a May 2024 Special Town Meeting to give their blessing to the bylaw. However, state law requires final approval by the state Attorney General’s Office, which on Nov. 14 of that year shot down the proposal by ruling that the warrant article needed to be adopted as a zoning bylaw, rather than a general bylaw, because it was written to regulate land use.
No Assault & Batteries member Court Dorsey said that he and his peers are disappointed by the Land Court’s decision, which was released on Thursday, but unsurprised, given the track record of rulings on cases like this.
“Wendell’s efforts to protect the health and safety of its residents and property from unsafe installations like lithium-ion batteries were forced on us because of the state’s unwillingness to provide such protections by statute,” Dorsey said in a statement. “The general bylaw that we wrote — and a similar bylaw submitted by Shutesbury — are just the latest examples of state overreach to limit our home rule and local police powers. Small rural towns should continue to speak out until our lawmakers on Beacon Hill can change the rules to give our towns more control over energy power, rather than less.”
The Land Court’s decision states that the proposed bylaw’s nature and purpose address concerns typical of zoning “and its effects on land use are predominant, not incidental or secondary.” Citing the law, the decision states that “a municipality’s ‘independent police powers … cannot be exercised in a manner which frustrates the purpose or implementation of a general or special law enacted by the Legislature.'” It goes on to say that the bylaw does not align with “legislative intent to protect solar energy uses from local interference.”
“The record therefore supports the attorney general’s determination that Wendell’s BESS bylaw should have been passed, if at all, as a zoning bylaw,” the decision continues. “Accordingly, the court finds that the attorney general did not act arbitrarily or capriciously, nor did she commit a substantial error, in disapproving the BESS bylaw.”
The Land Court also noted that Wendell has a history of regulating, or attempting to regulate, through its zoning law, the health, safety and welfare risks posed by battery energy storage system land uses.
No Assault & Batteries, formed in 2023 in opposition to a since-withdrawn proposal for a battery energy storage facility on Wendell Depot Road, raised $7,000 in donations to offset the legal costs of appealing to the Land Court. Attorney Jesse Belcher-Timme, of the Springfield law firm Doherty, Wallace, Pillsbury & Murphy, argued the case.
Greenfield resident Al Norman, a member of No Assault & Batteries who helped draft the proposed bylaw, previously said that the group doesn’t want “Wendell to be a guinea pig for this technology.” Laurel Facey, also a member of the grassroots group, said the failure of state energy policy to protect Wendell from the hazards of siting battery energy storage systems on natural environments makes it imperative for local communities to protect themselves from such adverse energy siting decisions.
“We argued that the BESS bylaw was enacted to address non-zoning related interests — the protection of town residents and the environment from fire risk and other safety hazards presented by BESS — and that any impact on land use is secondary to those aims,” she said in a statement. “The dominant purpose of the BESS bylaw was protecting the health, safety and welfare of residents of Wendell and its natural and built environments, and addressing the risk of fire, explosion and release of toxic gases from BESS.”