A Court Cleared Hinds County’s 5,800-Acre Solar Farm. The PSC Certificate Is Still the Gate.

The Mississippi Court of Appeals affirmed Hinds County’s approval of two conditional use permits for Soul City Solar on Tuesday, ending a zoning fight that began in 2024. The vote was 6 to 4. Judge Amy Lassiter St. Pe wrote the majority; Judge Latrice Westbrooks dissented, joined by Judges Donna Barnes, Virginia Carlton and Deborah McDonald, according to WLBT’s account of the opinion.

The split matters because of what the majority relied on. Lauderdale argued the Board of Supervisors never issued written findings of fact, which the county zoning ordinance requires. The majority held the board satisfied that requirement by incorporating Soul City’s 73-page application, its site plan and a May 22, 2024, supplemental letter into its written order. “Read together, the board’s approval and the incorporated materials constitute its written certification,” the court wrote, per WLBT.

Westbrooks called that insufficient. “Given the ordinance’s specificity, the minutes are insufficient to satisfy” the requirement, she wrote, adding that the planning commission had unanimously denied the application for a 5,800-acre utility-scale solar farm and storage facility expected to last 30 years. Her dissent would have reversed and remanded.

The acreage figures in the record do not agree, and the gap is not small. WLBT describes a 3,900-acre solar farm on about 5,800 acres of undeveloped land in western Hinds County. Mississippi Today, in its report on the ruling, describes a project taking up close to 6,000 acres near Bolton, with Apex Clean Energy advertising 396 megawatts, enough to power 95,000 homes. The Wire could not reconcile the numbers from the documents available; the county’s conditional use permit file is the record that would settle it.

The money is the part residents and county budget writers have the least in hand. Apex has said the project would produce roughly $150 million in county tax revenue over 30 years, plus 10 full-time jobs and 400 construction jobs, per Mississippi Today’s reporting. The company’s own appeal exhibit put the figure at up to $156 million in direct tax revenue over the first 30 years, and said Soul City would be one of Hinds County’s largest taxpayers in its first year of operation, anticipated in 2027.

What no public document reviewed for this article shows is the price of that revenue. The Board of Supervisors approved an ad valorem tax agreement for the project in November 2023, Mississippi Today reported. Apex’s director of public engagement, Brian O’Shea, said the agreement saves the company money long term but did not have an exact percentage, according to the same report. The county has not published the discount rate in the material the Wire could reach, so the effective tax rate Soul City pays, and what Hinds County schools forgo against a standard assessment, remain unstated.

The zoning ruling does not authorize construction. Soul City Energy, LLC filed for a certificate of public convenience and necessity with the Mississippi Public Service Commission on Dec. 3, 2024, docket 2024-UA-135, according to the Commission’s docket. Central District Commissioner De’Keither Stamps held a hearing in August 2025 and declined to rule while the zoning appeal was pending, WLBT reported. At that hearing, Allison Lauderdale told the commission two realtors had told her buyers wanted to see where the solar project went before committing to her property.

The certificate is not on the Commission’s November agenda. The utility docket for the PSC’s regular meeting on Tuesday, Nov. 17, 2026, at 10:00 a.m. in the courtroom on the first floor of the Woolfolk State Office Building in Jackson lists 2024-UA-135 nowhere among its items, though it carries other solar certificates and Entergy Mississippi’s storm cost rider dockets. That means the project’s remaining state approval has no scheduled date.

What’s next: the PSC’s Nov. 17 meeting is public and its docket is posted at psc.ms.gov, but readers should not expect a Soul City vote there. The next decision point is whenever the Commission takes up 2024-UA-135, and the record in that docket is where the megawatt count, the construction timeline and any conditions Stamps attaches will be fixed. Lauderdale’s side has not exhausted its appeals; a petition for review to the Mississippi Supreme Court is the remaining route, and the 6-4 split gives that argument a dissent to build on.

On the county side, the supervisors’ next regular meeting agendas are posted at hindscountyms.com, and the ad valorem agreement approved in November 2023 is the document to request if you want the discount rate in writing. Watch for a construction notice from Apex, which would signal the certificate has been granted without a contested hearing.