StateImpact Texas Feb 14, 2012
Dave Fehling
of StateImpact Texas
and David Barer of KUT Austin
contributed reporting to this article.
It’s not often you find the Tea Party and
environmentalists on the same side of an issue. But both are busy this week
protesting the Keystone XL
pipeline, a 1,700 mile-long project that would bring oil harvested from sand pits in
Canada to refineries on the Gulf Coast of Texas.
The environmentalists sent over half a million “anti-Valentines” proposing the pipeline to Congress,
which is maneuvering this week to overrule the
President’s denial of the pipeline.
The Tea Partiers, on the other hand, held a series of
press conferences across the state, alleging that the company behind the
pipeline is using eminent domain to force landowners to allow the line to be
built on their property. The activists have joined forces with other political groups and several landowners
who have refused to give the company building the pipeline, TransCanada,
permission to go through their land.
·
Pipeline Company Uses Eminent DomainSome
Landowners Say Their Rights Are Being OverlookedDownload
Julia Trigg
Crawford is one of those landowners. Her family has had a farm in Lamar County,
northeast of Dallas,
since the forties, where they grow soybeans, corn and wheat. A few years back, TransCanada approached her family about running the
Keystone XL pipeline through her farm. “Well, we didn’t sign initially, and
it’s kinda drug on and on,” she told StateImpact Texas.
“Each year they sent another letter saying there’ll be more money to kinda sweeten the pot.”
But Crawford
refused to sign.
She says she looked
into some environmental issues with the pipeline and how it would go through
her farm and wasn’t on board. “One of my first concerns was, to go the path
they had planned, they had to horizontally drill under the creek that I have
water rights to,” Crawford told StateImpact Texas.
“So, I didn’t exactly want this sludge being pumped underneath the creek.”
Crawford also said that if the pipeline was buried underneath her property it
could create a “vegetative dead zone” for her crops, because the temperature of
the line can get up to 140 degrees, she said.
After Crawford
repeatedly refused to allow TransCanada onto her
land, the company sought eminent domain last fall. While eminent domain is
typically used by governments to build public projects like roads, in Texas the legislature
grants the right to pipeline companies, too. In this case, the Railroad
Commission of Texas, which oversees drilling and pipelines in the
state, approved the company’s request that the pipeline be considered a
public project and eligible for eminent domain. Now Crawford says it could be
just weeks before they begin building the pipeline on her land. (TransCanada disputes this, saying that they still need a
permit for the pipeline.)
TransCanada says they’ve
settled all but 20 of the 80 eminent domain cases they’ve filed in Texas since
beginning the pipeline project, and that they pay “at
least” market value for the land, if not more. They have agreements with over
1,400 landowners in the state and aim to be “good neighbors” with landowners.
“We’ve acquired 97 percent of the easements in Texas,”
TransCanada spokesperson Jim Prescott said in an
interview with StateImpact Texas last month. “So, we’re ready to go. We
were ready to go a year ago, frankly, on this project. We’re ready to
start putting pipe into the ground.”
But how exactly did
a private pipeline company win eminent domain? TransCanada
said the company was a public “common carrier” pipeline and not a “private
line” in their petition to the Railroad commission. As Dave Fehling
of StateImpact Texas
reported
Monday, this reasoning is being used by other oil and gas pipeline
companies to gain easements over private property in Texas. In the case of TransCanada,
they argued that since the oil passing through the pipeline would ultimately be
used by the public, then the pipeline itself was a “public” pipeline, even
though its privately owned and operated.
A map of where the
Keystone XL pipeline would go through Texas
But some landowners
and Tea Partiers have fought back against that reasoning, and in August the
Supreme Court of Texas sided with them in the
case of Texas Riceland Partners vs. Denbury Green-Pipeline Texas. As we
reported Monday, the court found that the “only independent authority
judging whether the pipeline was public or private was the Railroad
Commission of Texas, which issues permits to pipeline companies. But the
court found that the commission does nothing to investigate a claim of public
use.” The court found that the commission simply relies on a form filled out by
the companies, where all they have to do is check a box saying whether it will
be public (a designation of “common carrier”) or private.
The commission says
they only decide whether or not the project can be qualified as being for
public use. “Eminent domain issues are a private party issue,” John Tintera, executive director of the commission, told StateImpact Texas.
“Beyond that “common
carrier” declaration, the role of the Railroad Commission is limited
after that.”
After the opinion
by the Supreme Court of Texas, the oil and gas industry has been
fighting to overturn it. (You can read more about those efforts in our earlier
report, Pipeline
Companies Fight for Right to Take Property.) Justices at the court will
meet this week to reconsider the decision. As Dave Fehling
reported, they may “decide if they will let their opinion stand or if they
should change portions of it to clarify their position. They could also agree
to re-hear the case, which would be rare. That happens only once or so a year
in the dozens of cases decided by the Court.”
But Crawford and
some other holdouts may not go quietly. While the Supreme Court of Texas revisits the decision, she’s filed
a temporary restraining order against TransCanada
in Lamar County.
http://stateimpact.npr.org/texas/2012/02/14/this-land-was-your-land-now-its-our-land-keystone-xl-and-eminent-domain/
What
is the Keystone XL Pipeline?
What
Is The Railroad Commission Of Texas?