Property Owners Brace For Constitution Pipeline Eminent Domain
“With the sugaring season ahead, the Holleran family should be installing sap-gathering lines on the mature maple trees growing on their property on Three Lakes Road.
They’re not going to bother this year. They don’t see a point in tapping trees that could soon fall to the chainsaws of Constitution Pipeline Co., which covets a strip of their land roughly 125 feet wide to build a natural gas pipeline to New York.
After two years of planning, public comment and government reviews, Constitution is anxious to get started. The maps are drawn. The pipe is stacked. More than a thousand people are ready to work.
The company needed 130 parcels in Pennsylvania and obtained almost all of them. The only things standing in the way of its Pennsylvania work are the Hollerans and six other holdouts.
In December, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the agency in charge of approving interstate gas pipelines, gave Constitution its approval to build the brand-new 126-mile line from Susquehanna County to Schoharie County, New York. The FERC’s approval gave Constitution eminent domain power under the Natural Gas Act to acquire easements on properties it picked for the pipeline route.
The company is a joint partnership among Williams Companies, Cabot Oil & Gas Corp., Piedmont Natural Gas Co. and WGL Holdings. The roughly $700 million pipeline would ship 650 million cubic feet of gas per day to markets in New York and New England.
Constitution must compensate the Hollerans and any other landowners whose properties it seeks to condemn. But that process takes time, and Constitution isn’t interested in waiting.
Arguing any delays would cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars a day, Constitution’s lawyers appeared Friday in federal court in Scranton seeking an emergency preliminary injunction that would grant access to the properties to complete surveying and begin cutting trees.”
Gibbons, Brendan. Power Source 16 February 2015.