Happy 2015, everyone! We’re sorry we’ve been away for a while. Since before the holidays, we’ve been attending to some life-matters and over the past few weeks, we’ve been getting back into the swing of a particularly busy new semester.
We do have a bit of news to share, however. Interestingly, the always-excellent Dave Hasemyer at Inside Climate News had a new story out last week featuring our friend Dave Gallagher. The story’s focus is on the incompleteness of restoration on the Line 6B replacement, a good companion piece to Rebecca Williams’ excellent Michigan Radio report a couple months back. Unfortunately, Hasemyer’s story doesn’t really take note of the many and varied other lingering issues on the Line 6B project: it’s not just a matter of restoring people’s land: all sorts of other promises that are not dependent upon the growing season– payments for damages, payments for crop loss, those makeup payments, among other things– have yet to be fulfilled also.
The timing of the ICN story is especially interesting because on Wednesday, we spent about an hour and a half meeting with Steve Wuori, Enbridge’s Strategic Advisor to the CEO; Leo Golden, Vice President of Major Projects; and Jason Manshum. The purpose of the meeting was to address matters like the above– as well as Enbridge’s shabby treatment of landowners generally– in the hopes of getting someone, finally, to take some swift and unequivocal corrective action. As so many readers of this blog already know, Enbridge has shown not even the slightest bit of urgency in attending to these things. Instead, they’re still haggling, hassling, foot-dragging, nickle-and-diming, or just plain ignoring landowners and their remaining concerns. For years, Enbridge has been willing to pay $2000 in attorney’s fees to fight against paying a landowner $1000. It’s time this stops.
We said all of this and more to Wuori, Golden, and Manshum. We did our best to explain– calmly, but in detail– that the mistreatment of landowners on the Line 6B project has been unconscionable, widespread, systemic, and continues still after all of this time– more than 3 years for some of us! We did our best to impress upon them that it is well past time for somebody, anybody, to step up and take charge, since the hapless (or just plain uncaring) people who have failed to get the job done to this point cannot be counted on. As one small example of the current state of things, we described an issue with some landowners who are trying to get compensation they were promised for a fence that was promised but never built. But their land agent is haggling with them over a paltry sum, stalling, and evading. What we said to Wuori is this: “Why not just write the damn check and be done with it? Why continue to torture these people, to frustrate them, to make enemies of them? Just write the damn check.” If Enbridge really wants to begin to try and repair the relationships they’ve damaged, they need to just write the damn checks.
That statement goes for just about everything. People have written agreements stipulating payments for crop loss: just write the damn checks. People have legal agreements for replacement trees: just get them the damn trees. People have unfixed damages to their homes and properties: just fix or pay for the damn damages. Many of these things can be resolved now, immediately, so that everybody can just move on.
The (possibly?) good news is that Wuori, Golden, and Manshum listened very attentively, took notes, and asked questions. At no point did they engage in excuse-making, “explaining,” or justifying of any kind. Frankly, this was a completely new experience for us in our dealings with Enbridge– and a refreshing one. Of course, based on past experience, we have every reason to be skeptical about the assurances we were given. But if we’re being honest– and that’s always been our policy here at this blog– it was probably the best interaction with Enbridge representatives we’ve ever had. For that reason we have some reason for (cautious) hope. For the first time we felt as if we were talking to people who were willing to concede (and they did) that they have failed to live up to their rhetoric and their corporate values and willing to take steps to make things right. We are very grateful they took the time to hear us out.
Most importantly, Wuori and Golden said they were going to get on this; we even received a follow-up email re-stating that pledge. For our part, we vowed to hold them to it– and offered to help in whatever way we can. So if you’re a Line 6B landowner with some outstanding issues or unfulfilled promises, let us know and we’ll be happy to pass them along.