If you missed it, we kicked off our new series on “Landowner Stories” yesterday. (We posted a general introduction to the series the day before that.) Marty and Patti Burke’s story is a moving one. Today, we bring you a second installment. And while we don’t plan to spend all of our time prefacing these stories with “I told you sos,” the truth is that we told ’em so. Today’s entry, from Allison Bader of Howell illustrates a couple of points we have made over and over and over again: first, that unhappy landowners are not just people who “oppose” the project. Allison makes quite clear that she was very much in favor of it. And second, that the land agent system is severely broken and is the source of much of Enbridge’s problem on this project. Too many people don’t know what to do once trust with their agent has been broken (and it is all too frequently broken!). Unless one is resourceful and persistent and able to track down someone other than one’s land agent to help, one is left helpless and lost.

By Allison Bader

Our land contractor was sweet as pie, always checking in on us if we had any questions, always aware of what was going on.  We felt rushed to get the contract signed “now, now” because the project was getting started.  Enbridge “needed” to take out 100 of my grandfather’s 30ft pine trees in order to save our pond.  Only 2 were allowed to be saved and transplanted, but we had to Rush to move them WHILE the demolitions crew came through. Then the site was left for over a month before construction actually began.

I had problems getting ahold of the contractor when ground was being broken and our pond was not protected as it was supposed to be according to our contract. When I did finally get to talk to him, he suddenly had no idea what was going on, did not know who to ask for help, and did not know what to do about fixing it. I found the Environmental Specialist of the project myself and he had a whole team working on silt fences and other pond protecting measures that very day. I was very thankful to the crew for that.  This summer one single worker took down the straw bales and straw roles around the pond just in time for it to rain and storm for the next week allowing dirt to run through the remaining silt fence and into our pond. Again our land contractor could not help us.  I finally found a worker who got a team to put up a second silt fence to prevent further damage.

We did not expect 2 summers to be ruined by this project and feel that we were not compensated accordingly. We have since discovered that both neighbors on either side, who have equal land space taken over, received twice as much in compensation without 100 trees taken out or a ruined pond. We never even got a land-bridge to the back of our property, which had been in our contract.

Overall, I thought this was a necessary project that could have been completed in a timely fashion while benefiting the community with jobs for the construction crew and with business to our locals from the construction crew. I now think that the process was drawn out unnecessarily and that those higher up in the company did not find the landowners very important as their Update Letters seem to suggest.

A few side notes:

-My neighbor is still waiting for his drain tile to be fixed.  The crew fixed our drain tile instead.

-I do hope my land restoration is complete and with grass grown by my wedding date next June.