"I think that on a Friday afternoon on a beautiful autumn day in Virginia, it’d be pretty difficult to hold a crowd, even one that is as learned and distinguished as this without somebody starting a rout, and I’m guessing that’s why I’m here," said Lynn Coleman, a board member for the Piedmont Environmental Council, as he delivered his remarks at a symposium on the Northern Virginia power line controversy sponsored by the Virginia Environmental Law Journal.
 A law school panel held a symposium on November 2 that looked at the the legal and environmental issues associated with Dominion Virginia Power’s planned construction of power lines through scenic open space in Northern Virginia. |
The controversy was sparked in 2006, when Dominion announced plans to build transmission lines from Virginia to New Jersey in order, the company says, to meet demand that has doubled since 1983. A little noticed 2005 change in federal law could allow Dominion to use eminent domain to obtain the land it needs. But Dominion has encountered fierce opposition from environmental activists and landowners in Northern Virginia who don’t want hulking 100′ towers on or next to their property. The symposium examined a particular legal argument raised by power line critics: that state-controlled conservation easements can’t be condemned without state consent.
"This is a highly protected part of the United States, and my way of thinking about it is, it’s hard for Dominion to think of a worse place to build a power line," said Coleman, pointing to all the historic battlefields, houses and conservation easements.
The speakers included a national legal scholar on easements, a Dominion rep, a man who helped write Virginia’s original Open-Space Land Act to allow for the easements, and an easement critic who thinks that easements help produce sprawl rather than control it.
"I think that conservation easements are a wasteful use of very scare and valuable federal taxpayer dollars," said John Echeverria, executive director of the Georgetown Environmental Law & Policy Institute. "Beyond that, the approach of relying on private volunteers to decide what lands they wish to conserve produces in my mind an irrational and what will prove to be an environmentally unfriendly conservation plan. …It doesn’t restrict the amount of development, it just moves it around." He made the case that by not going through easements, a larger amount of people will be affected by power lines.
But Echeverria was assuming that power lines were necessary in the first place, and that topic has been hotly contested by groups like the PEC. During the question period, Chris Miller of the PEC stood up from the audience to argue that Dominion is being disingenuous when it claims the new lines are necessary. "Increasing utilities are not operating in the public good. They’re operating in the commercial basis. …The assertion of need is something that is never really evaluated by public entities until and unless there is an adversarial process." He said that the state has no independent ability to verify transmission need.
The debate has implications for a conservation easement system in which Albemarle County is investing several million annually to keep development out of the rural areas.
"Whether or not condemnation is ever going to a threat to those easements is not clear in Albemarle," says County Attorney Larry Davis, who attended the symposium along with several other county staffers. "There is a potential in the future. It might not be power lines, it could be some other utility, it could be transportation improvements that might in the future conflict with these easements, so having the understanding of whether or not perpetual means protection from condemnation is a pretty serious issue for us in the long term."
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