TransCanada Pipeline Hearings -- How About a Little More Fanfare for the Common Man?

Also online at KELOLand.com!

The hard thing about the formal PUC hearings on the TransCanada Keystone pipeline is the mismatch in the opposing parties. On the one side, you have a wealthy and powerful corporation, TransCanada, represented by a wealthy and powerful lawyer, Brett Koenecke of Pierre, who has all the time Big Oil money can buy to study the law and industry reports and environmental studies. The big corporation has nothing to worry about: it has nothing to lose and something to gain. The lawyer has nothing to lose: he's getting paid handsomely, I assume by the hour, the same rate whether his client wins or loses. Every bit of research, every extra deposition he takes, every extra half-hour the hearings might drag on is a plus for him. Koenecke can relax, be cool, organize his arguments, make sober points of law, and get paid for it.

On the other side, you have a lot of regular folks who have nothing to gain and a lot to lose. No, it's not just a strip of land. It's freedom, independence, the right to do what they want to do on the little corner of the prairie that they thought their hard work and money (or their great-grandparents' hard work and money) had given them the final say over. These are folks who promised their ancestors, their parents, and their neighbors, and their kids that they would take of the land. They'd do what they could to stop others from harming that land.

And now these regular folks are staring down the barrel of the hardball tactics of lawyers and land agents who get paid to serve their corporate client's interest over that of local folks. These regular folks aren't getting paid to come up with clever questions and objections before the PUC. They aren't getting reimbursed for their mileage and meals to go to Pierre. They haven't had the pleasure of years of training in corporate law, state government hearing procedure, and environmental science -- they always thought simple honest work on the land was all they needed to secure their rights and well-being.

So as you listen to the PUC hearings, you can understand why the various "interveners," the private citizens who have a genuine beef with a foreign company acting like oil gives it ownership of our state, maybe don't sound as sharp as the well-paid lawyers in the room. The private citizens in the hearing room, like Curt Moeckly and Lillian Anderson, aren't trained in phrasing their questions to avoid objections from opposing counsel. No one has paid them (or their staff) to research and brief the thousands of pages of prefiled testimony. And if the hearing runs long, they don't get paid overtime. They're just honest folks -- our neighbors, fellow South Dakotans -- who grew up thinking that honest work and straight talk were all they needed to get by, and to make their land their own.