Pipelines pressure GOP legislators fraught with internal contradictions

Rural pressure against pipelines pumping liquefied CO2 by lever of eminent domain threatens to rupture Republicans controlling the statehouse.

Several bills promoted by Northwest Iowa legislators that would limit the use of land condemnation for pipeline easements are floating around the House and Senate. It appears that prospects are better in the House, but a March 3 deadline nears for the main bill, HF368, to clear committee.

That bill is backed by House Speaker Pat Grassley, and wins the support of the Iowa Farm Bureau. Rep. Steven Holt, R-Denison, is working hard to get it to the floor for a vote. Sen. Jeff Taylor, R-Sioux Center, has introduced similar legislation but he told The Des Moines Register he’s not certain it can get a committee hearing.

You have several prominent Republicans claiming that the current condemnation regime is a government theft of property rights, and you have Gov. Reynolds, the Branstads, Bruce Rastetter and the biofuels industry claiming that corn ethanol will die out in the decade without carbon sequestration.

Summit, led by Rastetter, has about two-thirds of the easements it needs to plow through Iowa on its way to burying liquefied carbon dioxide underground — it’s engineering gone mad. Grassley, Holt, Farm Bureau et al think a pipeline should have 90% voluntary easements before asking the Iowa Utilities Board to invoke eminent domain.

The Renewable Fuels Association has framed it as an either-or deal: Either you allow pipelines easy access through farms or you lose 30% of the value of your corn crop when the ethanol plant shuts down.

Not all farmers are buying it, obviously, if Pat Grassley has an ear for rural concerns. Many want to be simply left alone. They don’t like wind turbines, pipelines or anything else that might interfere with their wish to do as they please with their land. Still others are hoping to get a higher price by political leverage — if Summit and Navigator bid better they would have more sign-ups. A third pipeline company, Wolf, says it won’t use eminent domain in southeast Iowa. Note that Summit and Navigator are well into the permit application with the IUB. If eminent domain limits are put into law, Summit and Navigator could challenge it as changing the rules mid-course.

Farmers who are addicted to ethanol and the price rise they’ve enjoyed over the past decade don’t necessarily believe that cloud belching out over Hwy. 7 at Fort Dodge is a problem, not one whose capture should come at their expense. Half the state thinks climate change is a hoax. There are yet other farmers who see that corn ethanol’s days may be numbered anyway as our transportation fleet goes electric. Some are outraged that these pipelines are subsidized by tax dollars.

All of this gets heaped on the GOP caucus room table. The controversy within the rural base is the Republican Party’s alone.

The issue is timed to leak into the Republican presidential discussion. Eric Branstad is leading Donald Trump’s campaign. Gov. Reynolds is auditioning for vice president. Ted Cruz tied Trump in Iowa blatantly campaigning against corn ethanol. Voters at the Sheldon Pizza Ranch will want to know what Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley think about it. Do they favor Big Government taking property while using federal subsidies that benefit the elite?

Of course it raises all sorts of contradictions — you love ethanol but hate anyone, namely a local condemnation board, telling you how it’s going to be. Senate leaders hope it just dies out and goes away. But the whole property rights thing has taken on a life of its own, in many ways, in an environment fostered by no less than the Farm Bureau. People have been made to believe that the land is theirs and not the government’s.

If the Senate bulls can just sit on it, there will be resentments out here in the hinterlands, what we used to call Steve King Country. It’s a red-hot issue in Cherokee and O’Brien counties, which are the GOP base. It’s more likely that these bills will wither, since the power structure demands right-of-way. Still, they expose political fault lines that can become earthquakes when pressure builds. Strange when the Branstad/Reynolds franchise is at odds with the Farm Bureau and the Grassley franchise. What’s it got to do with the price of corn? Everything.

Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where this editorial appeared. For more columns and editorials, please consider a subscription to the Times Pilot. Or, if you wish, you can make a tax-deductible gift to the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation to support independent community journalism in rural Iowa. Thanks.

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