Pipeline project fuels anger in Georgia
A plan to build a pipeline along Georgia's coast has united
business, environmental and political leaders.
But that doesn't mean it won't be built.
By Greg Bluestein
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Neon-pink flags poke up from the black bottomland swamps here along a 210-mile stretch through east Georgia, rising from tangled underbrush and across murky creekbeds.
Each marks a 50-foot-wide path of the proposed Palmetto Pipeline that’s sparked one of the most remarkable battles over property rights in Georgia in recent memory.
A powerful trifecta of business forces, environmental groups and political leaders has united to fight the proposal from Kinder Morgan, the Texas company charting the fuel pipeline’s three-state course. Some of the landowners have already given up swaths of their property for towering transmission cables and roadways, but they draw the line at a pipeline for an area with no shortage of fuel.
State leaders in Georgia and South Carolina have recently thrown up new legal hurdles that threaten the construction. But for all the pushback, the project remains very much in play. The company faces an upcoming court date in Fulton County where it must prove the $1 billion project is a “public necessity,” a threshold that some legal experts say can be overcome.
And Kinder Morgan, which says it’s undaunted by the obstacles, is preparing to fight back in court, on the airwaves and in the halls of state government.
Map of the proposed Palmetto pipeline and existing pipelines.
Eminent domain among concerns
Plans for the Palmetto Pipeline were first revealed in late 2014, and within weeks, surveyors were scouting land for the buried 16-inch steel pipeline, which would pump gasoline, diesel and ethanol from Florida to South Carolina. They etched out a course for the line that hugs the Savannah River, then darts south to Jacksonville, Fla., going through 12 Georgia counties.
Kinder Morgan billed it as a cost-saving measure that would increase competition and could lower fuel prices along Georgia’s eastern reaches. The line will take 30,000 tractor-trailer round trips off Georgia highways, it said, and will add 1 million gallons a day to the “pipeline-constrained” Savannah market. Friendly landowners vouched for the project at town hall meetings and in TV campaigns.
Their proposal comes as pipeline projects — and controversy surrounding them — pop up across Georgia. A 157-mile Sabal Trail Pipeline that would cross nine southwest Georgia counties has sparked outrage in Albany and Valdosta. And Atlanta Gas Light wants to begin pumping gas from Coweta County to Dalton by 2017.
But Kinder Morgan’s proposal has struck a throbbing nerve, in part because of the length of the proposed pipeline — the 320-mile route stretches by Augusta, Savannah and Jacksonville — and in part because of the threat of eminent domain hanging over the landowners.
“Where do we draw the line? There are no reset buttons,” Troy Davis, a local landowner, said at one of the town hall meetings that Kinder Morgan called to calm fears about the project. “It will be a Kroger, a CVS, a Burger King that comes to this community and says, ‘Hey, we have a necessity for this.’ ”
Impact on fuel costs unclear
The most incendiary moment in the campaign may have happened on a clear, balmy Saturday in May when a group of surveyors ventured onto Billy Morris’ land.
Morris is the chief executive of Morris Communications, which runs the newspapers in all three major markets that the pipeline would span. He also owns Millhaven, more than 20,000 acres of hunter’s paradise, row crops and timber stands that could lose an 11-mile stretch to the pipeline.
In early May, when Kinder Morgan surveyors visited the property, they were promptly told to leave and accused of trespassing. A local deputy who was called to the scene wrote in a police report that a Kinder Morgan supervisor told him: “You can’t stop the pipeline, they have enough money to push the pipeline through the county.”
It was like pumping gasoline onto an already raging fire. The company apologized, but those words would be repeated again and again at town hall meetings arranged by the company to calm nerves about the project.
“Their intentions seem to be to force this pipeline down our throats, regardless of how it affects us,” Morris said at a raucous town hall meeting in Waynesboro five days later.
Within days, Gov. Nathan Deal came out, forcefully, against the proposal. He has not waded into the other projects and often professes a desire to steer clear of sticky local matters. But his administration points to vexing questions about the project, including how much of the fuel will end up marketed in Georgia.
“Up to this point in time, the state has had very little input,” Deal said in an interview in May.
In short order, Georgia transportation officials rejected the company’s plans and questioned whether the pipeline would reduce the price of fuel in the region.
In July, Kinder Morgan faced another setback when South Carolina’s attorney general issued an opinion that concluded the firm doesn’t have the power to condemn land for the project.
Both cases seem destined for court battles.
Public and private appeals
Kinder Morgan is taking a sharp-elbowed strategy to counter its opponents.
In a lengthy appeal, the company claimed that Georgia abused its discretion by denying the pipeline. An ad campaign features landowner Frank Flanders, who tells the cameras that the company’s workers are hunters and fishermen “just like you and I.”
An ad released by Kinder Morgan in support of the company's proposed pipeline.
And at the public meetings, executives present Kinder Morgan as a conscientious partner that has taken painstaking steps to avoid disturbing the environment.
“We have a long history in the state of Georgia and recent construction of major pipeline projects,” Allen Fore, a Kinder Morgan vice president, said at one meeting. “And we understand the regulatory environment here.”
There’s a quieter behind-the-scenes pitch underway as well. The pipeline company has eight lobbyists on its rolls and hired Atlanta law firm giant King & Spalding to press its case. An attorney with the firm recently said in a letter to state officials that the project will “provide a stable source” of fuel for east Georgia even when hurricanes ravage the Gulf of Mexico or the Atlantic Coast.
Opponents are digging in for a long fight. Many initially submitted to the firm’s requests, some saying because they sensed it was inevitable, only to rescind it as opposition brewed.
Much of the public pushback is orchestrated by Tonya Bonitatibus, the head of the Savannah Riverkeeper and an Augusta native who has waged a social media-friendly campaign against the pipeline. On one visit to the backcountry brambles, she beckoned to an aging cypress tree’s twisted limbs.
“Some of these guys probably saw Oglethorpe coming up the river,” she said.
She was joined in this visit by Debo Boddiford, a Sylvania resident whose husband’s family has lived near the pipeline’s proposed path along the Savannah River since 1887. She was asked why she felt so passionately about the gnarled landscape, where coiled rattlesnakes lie in wait and murky swamps rise and fall with the seasons.
“This land is our heritage. It’s our connection to our ancestors,” she said. “And it’s something we want to preserve and pass on to our family, our children, our descendants.”