Landowners tell proposed LNG export terminal in Coos Bay: 'Keep your pipeline off my property'

Bill Gow stands on a wooden platform perched high above a lush valley south of Roseburg, his Stetson tipped back as he surveys the 1,400-acre ranch where his family runs cows for a living.

"This is why I worked 24-7 my whole life, so I could wake up and have this," he says. "This is all I ever wanted."

It's not hard, then, to understand Gow's sense of violation, his creeping feeling of helplessness, with a Canadian energy company's plan to carve a swath the width of freeway through his land and bury a 36-inch-diameter, high-pressure gas pipeline.

Calgary-based Veresen Inc. and its pipeline partner, Tulsa-based Williams Companies Inc., are not asking if Gow wants to host their gas line. They're telling him. If regulators approve Veresen's plan to build an export terminal for liquefied natural gas in Coos Bay, its Pacific Connector Pipeline is coming across his land.

The only thing left to settle is the price. And he may not have much say in that either.

It's called eminent domain.

About this series

The Oregonian is reporting a series of stories on what the Jordan Cove liquefied natural gas project in Coos Bay involves, its effect on communities and the global economics driving this push to export natural gas.

The next installment will look at environmental impacts of the proposed terminal and pipeline as soon as the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission releases its draft environmental impact statement. Add your questions and comments at the end of this story, or send them to investigative reporter Ted Sickinger at tsickinger@oregonian.com.

To read previous installments, watch videos and see more photos and diagrams, go to oregonlive.com/watchdog

More than 300 southern Oregon property owners are in the same position. The Pacific Connector would stretch halfway across the state, from a gas hub in Malin, southeast of Klamath Falls, to feed the proposed Jordan Cove Energy Project in Coos Bay.

Along its 230-mile path, contractors would clear-cut public and private forests, tunnel under hundreds of rivers and streams and plow across more than 400 parcels of privately owned land.

The projects backers say they can accomplish all this in a fair and equitable manner, while minimizing environmental and property damages. They say eminent domain is a last resort, used only if it's impossible to reach a mutually agreeable deal with a landowner, and only after an impartial arbitrator determines a fair price for easements and damage.

Yet the threat of condemnation is the company's silent partner in any negotiation. And many landowners want nothing to do with the project.

"They're Canadian, they want to get their gas to China, and we're in the way," said Francis Eatherington, the president of the Oregon Women's Land Trust, a nonprofit that could see a half-mile section of the pipe on its retreat east of Canyonville. "It's our own government that's not standing up for its citizens."

Richard Allan, a Portland land-use attorney working with Pacific Connector, says landowners lose nothing by talking with the pipe's land-use team and allowing them to survey. They can still participate in local land-use decisions and FERC's licensing process. But those who stonewall the company don't stop the pipeline, while depriving the company of the information it needs to come up with a fair price or modify the route where possible.

"The only people who ultimately benefit from going to court are the lawyers," he contends.

Pacific Connector ran an option program to acquire easement agreements that expired last summer. That was a one-time deal, Angerbauer said, designed to provide property owners with some upfront compensation for the inconvenience of surveying and other activities.

The company says only 38 out of 304 affected landowners signed the agreements – about 13 percent. The company already has decided to increase what it pays landowners for permanent easements on their land, from what was often 25 percent of the land's market value to a minimum of 50 percent.

"We're not trying to look at the low end of the range," Angerbauer. "We're looking to give landowners a deal they'll feel good about."

Landowners who signed the option agreements may not get a second bite at the apple, however. The agreements are binding, at the price that was set. All that remains is a determination of damages for crop losses and other use restrictions.

John Tansey, an 85-year-old who owns 50 acres of mostly timberland on a mountainside near Myrtle Creek, says he's already having second thoughts. The pipe route only touches a corner of his property and the company has already paid him more than $2,000, "but I'm kind of against it."

He worries about fire danger, adequate insurance if anyone gets hurt on his land and the damage to his private road and land from hauling heavy equipment up the mountainside. "There so many things they don't tell you about."

James Seaton, another Myrtle Creek resident, says the pipe only affects about a third of an acre at the back of his 20-acre property, and he took the $2,000 because he needed it.

"My wife passed away recently and we spent lot of money while she was sick," he said. "The way they're talking, it'll be 3 or 4 years before they do anything. I didn't think I'd live that long anyway."

-- Ted Sickinger

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