Major news out of Brandon Township: at the end of a very long and exhausting meeting last night, the new Brandon Township Board of Trustees voted to approve a (not quite finalized) agreement with Enbridge. Full details are forthcoming and we will, of course, write about them once they’re available. But this agreement effectively ends any further litigation (assuming Enbridge complies with all of the agreement’s provisions) on the part of Brandon. They won’t intervene in the POLAR suit again.

A lot happened at the meeting and there were some interesting new developments. On the whole, we’re ambivalent about this turn of events (perhaps because we don’t have all the details yet). It’s good in some ways and perhaps not so good in others. But one thing is for sure: it’s going to take a series of posts to get through it all. Right now, we can only offer a few teasers:

• We heard a couple of new ugly landowner stories. Interestingly, Enbridge hopped right to it with one of them. We hope to follow up to see whether and how the situation gets resolved.
• Other Michigan townships should take note: Enbridge agreed to take some very positive steps that should also be taken with regard to EVERY township along the route. You can bet that we’ll be contacting some township supervisors.
• Speaking of those positive steps, we’ll spend some time asking the obvious question: why didn’t Enbridge just do these things way back in July or so?
• Finally, we approached Tom Hodge during a break in the meeting and asked if he’d be willing to do a little Q&A with us for the blog, since he’s made himself so available to the media of late. He did not jump at the opportunity. Instead, he and Enbridge General Counsel Mark Curwin said that they’re trying to figure out who the right person is for us to talk to. We’re not sure exactly what that means, but we’re pretty sure that if we have questions we’d like to ask Tom Hodge that the right person for us to talk to is… well, Tom Hodge. We’ll see what comes of this.

Oh, residents and landowners of Brandon Township: get ready for the dozers. We suspect they’re fired up and chugging already this morning.