Farmers could derail Keystone XL pipeline
Pruitt visits Superfund site
NELIGH, NEBRASKA, April 20, (RTRS): When President Donald Trump handed TransCanada Pipeline Co. a permit for its Keystone XL pipeline last month, he said the company could now build the long-delayed and divisive project “with efficiency and with speed.”
But Trump and the firm will have to get through Nebraska farmer Art Tanderup first, along with about 90 other landowners in the path of the pipeline.
They are mostly farmers and ranchers, making a last stand against the pipeline - the fate of which now rests with an obscure state regulatory board, the Nebraska Public Service Commission.
The group is fine-tuning an economic argument it hopes will resonate better in this politically conservative state than the environmental concerns that dominated the successful push to block Keystone under former President Barack Obama.
Backed by conservation groups, the Nebraska opponents plan to cast the project as a threat to prime farming and grazing lands - vital to Nebraska’s economy - and a foreign company’s attempt to seize American private property.
They contend the pipeline will provide mainly temporary jobs that will vanish once construction ends, and limited tax revenues that will decline over time.
Trump
Challenge
They face a considerable challenge. Supporters of the pipeline as economic development include Republican Governor, Pete Ricketts, most of the state’s senators, its labor unions and chamber of commerce.
“It’s depressing to start again after Obama rejected the pipeline two years ago, but we need keep our coalition energized and strong,” said Tanderup, who grows rye, corn and soybeans on his 160-acre property.
Now Tanderup and others are gearing up for another round of battle - on a decidedly more local stage, but with potentially international impact on energy firms and consumers.
Meanwhile, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency toured an Indiana public-housing complex on Wednesday where roughly 1,000 people were ordered evacuated because of lead contamination, his first visit to a Superfund site that some environmental advocates called a major leadership test.
EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt joined Indiana leaders including Gov. Eric Holcomb, U.S. Sens. Joe Donnelly and Todd Young, and East Chicago’s mayor for closed-door meetings in an industrial corridor of Indiana roughly 25 miles from downtown Chicago. Pruitt is the first EPA administrator to visit the site, according to EPA officials. He met with residents and toured the complex where evacuations began last year. “The reason I’m here is because it’s important that we restore confidence to the people here in this community that we’re going to get it right,” he said in a roughly 90-second statement to reporters. “They can have the confidence that their land, their health is going to be secure in the long-term.”