Heidepriem and Landowners vs. TransCanada: Let's Rumble!

The Canadians may have given us a whoopin' in the War of 1812 (my Canadian friends still brag about that), but expect South Dakotans to give Canadian corporation TransCanada a tougher fight as it tries to invade our state and commandeer farmland that has been in the hands of our families for four or five generations.

KELO runs a story over the weekend on how landowners are organizing a serious legal challenge against Transcanada's effort to use eminent domain to build its Keystone pipeline across our state ["Organized Fight for Landowner Rights," KELOLand.com, 2007.10.07]. A half dozen Marshall County landowners have hired Sioux Falls lawyer (and State Senate minority leader) Scott Heidepriem to fight TransCanada in court. Heidepriem says he's received calls from 58 other landowners who share his clients concerns about why a foreign corporation providing no direct benefit to the general welfare in South Dakota can claim the right to take South Dakota land for its own profit-making activities.

"TransCanada's response in the media has been they are going to create three jobs, and in exchange they are going to run pipeline under a couple hundred miles of the richest farmland in South Dakota. And at some point there has to be a comparison of the upside and the downside in terms of public necessity," Heidepriem said.

Three jobs?! We could put more people than that to work turning just one mile of the proposed pipeline route into an organic tomato garden.

Better yet, let's compare the economic benefits of investment in wind power to getting in bed with Big Oil. Evidently Transcanada needs to push landowners around and take away their land to build a pipeline. They tear up a long stretch of land and create a permanent threat to the health of the ecosystem, not to mention a permanent decrease in the productive and sales value of the land.

Wind farms don't appear to create any trouble like that. When's the last time you heard of a wind power corporation trying to condemn a farmer's land? if one farmer doesn't want to do business with a wind company, the company just moves down the road to see if the next landowner is interested. And when the wind company does make a deal, it doesn't take the land away; it leases the land, creating a new and regular stream of revenue for the farmer that makes up for the minimal crop land lost. The wind company makes the farmer a partner and profit-sharer, not a defendant in court. To top it off, a windmill isn't going to leak a few thousand gallons of oil into the field and ruin crops for a couple years.

TransCanada has proven it will be a rotten corporate neighbor. Fortunately we won't have to fight the War of 1812 over. All we need is for the PUC to say, "No deal" and focus its attention on developing a native resource, wind power. Let's support landowners and lawyer Heidepriem in kicking these Alberta oilmen out of our state. (But keep those Alberta clippers coming -- we can put that wind to work!)