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Iowa House approves bill to ban use of eminent domain for Summit pipeline
The Iowa House has passed a bill that would prevent Summit Carbon from using eminent domain authority to seize land along its proposed pipeline route.
Republican Representative Steven Holt of Denison said people who don’t want the pipeline on their property should have the right to say no. “It affects their business. It affects their lives,” Holt said, “and they were there first.”
The bill, which is two pages long, is similar to a law in South Dakota, and it passed the Iowa House on a 64-28 vote after about half an hour of debate.
Republican Representative Brian Lohse of Bondurant said the Iowa and U.S. Constitutions require that laws apply equally to all those impacted, and that’s why he could not support the bill. “What this bill does is create two separate regulatory schemes depending on what’s going through the pipeline if you say to one pipeline company…and their gas pipelines, ‘You can use the eminent domain,’ but then tell another pipeline that’s running a different kind of gas, ‘You can’t.'”
Republican Representative Chad Ingels, a farmer from Randalia who voted no, said the bill would block construction of the carbon pipeline, a project he said would be a public good because it would boost the bottom line for farmers who sell their corn to make ethanol.
“Having better markets for our products is not only in my family’s best interest, it’s my neighbor’s best interest, it’s in a farmer in southwest Iowa’s best interest,” Ingels said. “…It’s in the best interest of our state to have young people willing to come back and farm.”
Holt said the carbon pipeline may be beneficial to some, but it doesn’t serve a public purpose. “I think we all want economic development, but not at the expense of the constitutionally protected rights of our fellow citizens,” Holt said. “…The precedent we will set if we allow private property to be seized for a private economic development project will reverberate for decades to come and could render property rights safeguards in our constitution meaningless for our children and our children’s children.”
This bill now goes to the Senate and is among a handful of pipeline-related proposals the House has passed over the past five years. On Tuesday, Senate Republican Leader Mike Klimesh proposed an alternative that would widen the pipeline corridor so Summit could go around landowners who’ve refused to grant the company an easement on their property.
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