Iowa, Eminent Domain and NIMBYs

Clean Line Energy Partners went into panic mode when dozens of landowners stormed the Capitol in Des Moines this week.  While legislation proposed to protect landowner rights under threat of eminent domain takings for the company's Rock Island Clean Line project passed out of committee, it failed to advance because Mother Nature intervened and turned the legislature dysfunctional at a crucial time.

However, all is not lost.  As Clean Line's snarky editorial tells us, "...it could come back as an amendment tacked onto another bill that's still alive."

And what's up with the name-calling in that editorial?  NIMBY?  Is that the best Clean Line could do to lobby for its project? 

But some people don't like the project, which is why the bill came forward. Landowners who are wary of eminent domain powers are speaking up against the project. In large part it has become an issue pitting pro-business groups and legislators against people who carry the NIMBY, or Not in My Backyard, mindframe.

Name-calling is one of the cheapest propaganda devices.  By placing opponents into unacceptable groups, the propagandist attempts to remove them from the argument before their positions can be logically considered.

Propagandists use the name-calling technique to incite fears or arouse positive prejudices with the intent that invoked fear (based on fearmongering tactics) or trust will encourage those that read, see or hear propaganda to construct a negative opinion, in respect to the former, or a positive opinion, with respect to the latter, about a person, group, or set of beliefs or ideas that the propagandist would wish the recipients to believe. The method is intended to provoke conclusions and actions about a matter apart from an impartial examinations of the facts of the matter. When this tactic is used instead of an argument, name-calling is thus a substitute for rational, fact-based arguments against an idea or belief, based upon its own merits, and becomes an argumentum ad hominem.

Clean Line is so frightened by the righteous concerns of landowners being asked to make a sacrifice for the pecuniary aspirations of a company from Texas, that they have resorted to cheap party tricks like "NIMBY."

News Flash:  Use of the "NIMBY" name in transmission battles is passe and ineffective.  The Alliance has already overcome that stereotype quite effectively.

And why shouldn't landowners be concerned or, as the editorial puts it, "not like the project."  The project is asking them to sacrifice their property, their business, their peace of mind and their physical well-being for the needs of some phantom others in "states farther east."  Who wouldn't resist it?  Would you resist a similar attack on your own home, income and way of life?

In addition, the "project" isn't even needed for reliability or economic reasons.  It's a scheme to make a lot of money supplanting existing generation in "states farther east" that have no desire for the power in the first place. 

While the financial windfalls may be shared with a handful of politically-connected landowners in NW Iowa who voluntarily host turbines, the buck stops there.  The Alliance landowners are being forced to take a one-time "market value" payment, not share in the wealth.  Their contribution to the effort is not being fairly recognized or compensated. 

While Clean Line's lobbyists hyperventilate that the legislation will "shut down this project as well as kill jobs,” the proposed legislation merely removed the company's threat of eminent domain against landowners who refused to go along.  As the Illinois Farm Bureau said in its Illinois Commerce Commission brief:

"In addition, if granted § 8-503 relief, what Rock Island characterizes as “voluntary” easement negotiations with farmers will actually sound something like “Rock Island has been directed by the Commission to construct a transmission line on an approve[d] route, which crosses your land.” Characterizing the easement negotiations as voluntary under these facts is kind of like giving someone the option of jumping off of a cliff before you push them."

If RICL is a viable and economic project, it shouldn't have any trouble compensating landowners to their satisfaction, and would not need the threat of eminent domain.  The use of eminent domain for private gain is the issue here, not jobs or economic development.  At what point does a person's right to own and enjoy property become less than another individual's desire to confiscate that property for his or her own pecuniary goals?  If you believe this is okay, as long as it's in someone else's back yard and you're sharing in the wealth, you're heading down a very slippery slope.  Because if you think it's okay in someone else's back yard, you are also saying it's okay in your own, and some day, the chickens are going to come home to roost and then you will be the "NIMBY." 

Why is Clean Line so scared?  Think about it.