Landowners are appealing a district court decision that gave a developer access to more than 300 private properties along the route of the Maryland Piedmont Reliability Project (MPRP).
The MPRP is a controversial 70-mile power line poised to cut a 150-wide line across Baltimore, Carroll and Frederick Counties.
The developers of the powerline say it's needed to bolster the local power grid, but residents are concerned it will only be an extension cord for Northern Virginia data centers.
The Public Service Enterprise Group (PSEG), parent company to the MPRP, took more than 300 landowners along the route of the MPRP to court across June and July for access to their land.
The court ruled in favor of PSEG, allowing the electric company to begin gathering geological data needed to complete the MPRP’s application. In September, a group of landowners filed an appeal arguing the court broke the normal chain-of-events in their decision.
Appeal
In the appeal, it’s outlined that in order for a company like PSEG to go onto someone’s private property, they would first need to have eminent domain rights. According to Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute, eminent domain is the government's power to, “take private property and convert it into public use.”
It’s argued in the appeal that PSEG can only earn eminent domain rights after acquiring a Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity (CPCN). PSEG needs a CPCN from the Public Service Commission (PSC) in order to construct the MPRP.
The PSC has said the electrical company must gather the necessary geological data outlining the project's environmental impacts before the MPRP’s CPCN application can be completed. Thus the court ruled in favor of PSEG so it could gather that data.
Carroll County Farmer Melvin Baile Jr. says he’s worried about the precedent the court's ruling could make when the next developer comes to his land. “PSEG should not have had the ability to come onto our properties as uninvited guests until they get the necessity certification from the Public Service Commission,” Baile argued.
Brookside Farms
Baile is the owner of Brookside Farms and his family has owned land in Maryland for nearly a century. His great grandfather bought the family's first tract of land in 1930 with his grandfather buying a second parcel in 1959.
Today, Baile farms on nearly 300 acres of land that he either owns or rents from other landowners and produces corn, soy beans, cattle and hay for feed.
Baile uses a helicopter to dust his corn with a fungicide that protects against Tar Spot, which can greatly lower crop yield. He’s worried that with the powerlines up, he won't be able to protect his farm. “If I would be growing corn under or in a restricted area around the powerlines, that I couldn’t fly [over]...then the profit potential hasn’t been reduced, its red ink,” Baile explained.
Baile’s farm is also the site of numerous sink holes, which he says pose a threat to PSEG’s surveyor crews, and by extension, himself. He’s worried for the safety of the workers, but has also spoken with PSEG about who is liable if one of the workers gets hurt on his land.
PSEG plans to create a temporary access road to be able to get equipment to the site of the high voltage towers that could be going up on Baile’s farm, but the farmer is concerned the road will simply become permanent. He asks how else will PSEG access the towers for maintenance.
Farmland needs to breathe, Baile points out, and says the kind of heavy machinery PSEG may use could compact the earth. It could take decades for the damage to the soil structure to be repaired. “I’m not going to live long enough to see the crop production restored to what it was before they started going across there and compacting the ground,” Baile said.
A court date for the appeal has not yet been scheduled at this time.
