No sooner had we finished up our latest post about Enbridge’s apparently congenital inability to deal with stakeholders straightforwardly than we were provided with yet another illustration of the phenomenon in the form of the latest news from Brandon Township. Sadly, it doesn’t surprise us.
The Brandon Trustees held another meeting last night, where they were expected to sign and finalize their agreement with Enbridge. We took the night off and did not attend the meeting, though we’ve received a report of it. And just as we predicted, things did not go smoothly. Therefore, no agreement has been signed.
There are a couple of sticking points: understandably (in our opinion), the Trustees are concerned about the limited scope of the oversight granted to the township’s inspector (we thought the same thing when we read the proposed agreement). And secondly, apparently Enbridge did not want to put anything in the agreement about their environmental stewardship program. In our view, this is especially disturbing since these are the two elements of the agreement that will be most important to other townships. Given that fact, however, it’s not so surprising that Enbridge would hedge about them. And to make it all worse, Enbridge has apparently re-started construction in Brandon–without a signed agreement. This is, in our view and the Board’s (as we understand it), not only presumptuous, but a slap in the face.
For now, we’ll just say this: it gives us no great joy to say “I told you so.” But all of this is exactly what we told the new Brandon board two weeks ago. As we reported then, we told them:
Based on [our] experience, what will happen is fairly predictable: Enbridge will show up, smile, talk about working together and being good neighbors; they’ll say lots of pleasing-sounding things; they’ll try and make it look like they really do want to work with the Township; they’ll also patronize and condescend (because they can’t help it)– and then they’ll leave and continue to try and do whatever it is they want.
And this is exactly what has happened. Jeff Axt saw it coming, too. It’s why both of us pleaded with the board at the last meeting to proceed cautiously, despite Enbridge’s pressure to hurry them up. But then, everybody has to learn their own Enbridge lessons. We trust that the new Board– now that they’ve seen Enbridge thumb its nose at them, just as they did the old board– has learned theirs.