An Old Texas Tale Retold: the Farmer vs. the Oil Company

[mahatmakanejeeves]

There's an earlier account of the dispute in Places » U.S. » Texas (Group).

Texas delivers victory for property rights in Keystone pipeline fight

An Old Texas Tale Retold: the Farmer vs. the Oil Company

By SAUL ELBEIN
Published: May 7, 2012

SUMNER, Tex. — When the TransCanada men first came, Julia Trigg Crawford said, they were polite. They offered money. Seven thousand dollars to let the Keystone XL pipeline cross her family’s 600-acre farm on its way from the Alberta tar sands to the refineries on the Gulf Coast.
....

Then, she said, TransCanada “went full radio silence.” The Crawfords never heard back from them — until October, when they got a letter saying their land had been condemned and a lease awarded to TransCanada.

But as the Crawfords discovered, when voluntary compensation agreements are not reached, Texas law allows certain private pipeline companies to use the right of eminent domain to force landowners to let pipelines through. This was true even for TransCanada, which has yet to get State Department permission to bring the Keystone XL across the Alberta border.

The Crawfords’ condemnation hearing happened in front of a district judge. They were not invited to that hearing — landowners in Texas do not get to go to the actual condemnation hearing. They are invited only to the next step, after the condemnation, when a three-person panel of county landowners decides on a value for the property being condemned.

[alfredo]

1. That reminds me of what the coal companies did to landowners in E Ky.