content: Here's the local article.  Highlights:  During the public comment period preceding the rezoning vote, citizens expressed distrust and fear of the solar panels. Mary Hobbs has been living in Woodland for 50 years and said she has watched it slowly becoming a ghost town with no job opportunities for young people. She said her home is surrounded by solar farms and is no longer worth its value because of those facilities. Jane Mann said she is a local native and is concerned about the plants that make the community beautiful. She is a retired Northampton science teacher and is concerned that photosynthesis, which depends upon sunlight, would not happen and would keep the plants from growing. She said she has observed areas near solar panels where the plants are brown and dead because they did not get enough sunlight. She also questioned the high number of cancer deaths in the area, saying no one could tell her that solar panels didn’t cause cancer. He said the solar farms would suck up all the energy from the sun and businesses would not come to Woodland.  I don't think the town was putting forward any money to the project, so that wouldn't have cost them anything, and the concerns about property value seems unfounded as the town already has solar farms and the company rep (obviously not an unbiased source) alleged no negative property value effects due to solar farms across the state. And I'm skeptical of how rezoning land (unless it's destroying existing commercial property) can negatively impact the job market, especially if it's been deteriorating long enough for the transition to be described as "slowly becoming a ghost town". Essentially the council voted against it because the town came out against it; and the town came out against it because the have misconceptions on the technology and want a scapegoat for other problems.