Farmers vs Oregon LNG

Access to information was at the crux of hearings held last week to clarify conflicts between landowners and Oregon LNG and the Oregon Pipeline. The hearings were ordered by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and held over three days in Astoria, Forest Grove and Portland.

I attended the final day, Thursday, at Portland City Hall. Administrative Law Judge Bobbie McCartney was a breath of fresh air, asking sharp questions, putting witnesses at ease, and bringing some humor to the necessary tedium of this kind of thing. She was very understanding of the fact that a lot of the testimony was a little vague. Two and three years ago, when landowners first started hearing that a natural gas pipeline might be passing through their land, they weren’t writing down dates or labeling documents. Their statements were also constrained because their central concern — that a liquefied natural gas company is planning to lay claim to swaths of their property — was outside the scope of the hearings.

The repeated complaint within the scope of the hearings was lack of information. Landowners have had a hard time getting detailed pipeline maps, and frequently were not informed about public hearings. During a tour of the pipeline route conducted by Oregon LNG and FERC, a farmer and her sister followed the tour van around all day in their car because no one would give them the tour’s itinerary. Later when the judge asked this farmer to put an aerial map into evidence she refused to let it go, clutching it like treasure map.

It’s likely that many affected parties didn’t know about the hearing I attended. In a follow-up column written the next day, Joyce Sauber of the Hillsboro Argus writes, “To this date, there are still hundreds of property owners in our Gales Creek Valley and along the two proposed LNG pipeline routes, who do not know there have been hearings, meetings and site tours, or that one of these two proposed LNG pipelines will cross their property.”

After the hearing there was an LNG protest outside City Hall. I milled around, taking photos and trying to gauge the reaction of passers-by. Somehow this protest felt different from protests I’ve attended on other issues. It took me a while to figure it out. It was the informational quality of it — at least in Portland, an LNG protest isn’t about registering opposition, it’s about registering that the issue exists at all.