If thou art a crude pipeline, thou art a common carrier.
W
HETHER IT’S PIPELINES OR POWER LINES BEING AIMED AT a route across your land, be engaged in the routing process early, get professional legal help with the negotiations and consider some non-monetary options in the easement agree- ment. Those were just 3 of several points made
by attorneys Zach Brady and Tom Zabel at the Private Property Rights Town Hall, part of the 2014 Cattle Raisers Convention in April. In the June issue, we presented the fi rst half of
the Town Hall discussion in the article “Everyone’s Drought.” This month, we present part of the discus- sion on eminent domain. Attorneys Zach Brady and Tom Zabel joined modera-
tor Jim Malewitz, energy reporter for the Texas Tribune, on the stage for the discussion. The Town Hall was sponsored by Hargrove Ranch Insurance. “Our country’s energy boom has spurred a need for
more pipelines and power transmission lines,” Malewitz said. “They need to go somewhere and that reality has prompted negotiations and certainly confl icts between landowners and pipeline and transmission company operators,” he began, introducing Brady and Zabel. Brady is a founding partner of Brady and Hamilton
LLP, Lubbock. He specializes in agricultural law with a focus on real property litigation including eminent domain and water rights. Zabel, partner with Zabel Free- men, Houston, is an attorney and petroleum engineer and has more than 26 years of experience. His clients include major and independent oil and gas companies, service companies, pipeline companies and individuals. Malewitz asked the attorneys how landowner rights
might differ based on the item being routed, a pipeline or a power line. Brady began by saying the power line routing pro-
60 The Cattleman July 2014
cess is more transparent to the public than the pipeline routing process. “To build that power line that utility company has
to go the Public Utility Commission (PUC) to fi le a set of potential routes,” Brady said. The landowners who could be impacted by those potential routes are noti- fi ed and have the ability to provide input into the route decision-making process. “On the pipeline side,” Brady said, “the pipeline com-
pany determines the route. There is no transparency to the landowner in terms of where else the project is going or what are the alternatives.” This difference is frustrating to many of his land-
owner clients, who have had “no seat at the table” in pipeline route discussions. He and Zabel indicated that landowners might have been willing to accept a lower price for a pipeline easement if they’d been able to discuss an alternative placement across a ranch to lessen the impact of the pipeline route on operations, landscape, scenery or for other reasons. Brady said, “By the time the landowner gets to the table to say this other route would have been so much better, the engi- neering is already done and the pipeline has already been ordered and set.” Zabel agreed, “I’ll echo that. What Zach says is
true. On electric lines, if you want to challenge rout- ing, you’d better get to the PUC and intervene, and get it done there, because once the route is approved, it’s not changing when you litigate on condemnation.” With pipelines, he said, “The very fi rst time a pipe-
line company contacts you to get survey permission across your property, if you have a specifi c route or routing issue, if you want to miss groves of trees, keep it away from certain signifi cant features on your ranch, then the sooner you mention that the better. The more
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