Missouri bills clipping Grain Belt eminent domain power unlikely to advance

(The Center Square) – A House bill requiring county commissions to approve proposed electrical transmission lines was approved two months ago but has idled in the Senate since.

House Bill 527, filed by Rep. Mike Haffner, R-Pleasant Valley, was advanced in a 123-33 vote on Feb. 25 and sent to the Senate Commerce, Consumer Protection, Energy and the Environment Committee on March 11 without a hearing.

HB 527 revives a 2019 eminent domain battle that pits farmers in northern Missouri against southern Missouri county commissions seeking to secure less expensive energy through the Grain Belt Express project.

The bill seeks to undo a Missouri Public Service Commission (PSC) determination that Chicago-based Invenergy can condemn property for its $2.3 billion Grain Belt transmission line.

Invenergy’s Grain Belt Express project would traverse 780 miles and four states to deliver 4,000 megawatts of wind-derived energy from western Kansas to Indiana, where it will be fed into an 11-state grid.

The PSC rejected the project in 2018, which would traverse 206 miles in Missouri and span eight counties, largely over property rights objections.

However, when Invenergy assumed ownership of the project in 2019, it asked the PSC to designate it as a public utility to grant it eminent domain authority to condemn private property to secure rights-of-way easements, the PSC agreed.

In May 2019, the Missouri House moved a bill similar to Haffner’s HB 527 that would have barred Invenergy from using eminent domain to build transmission lines.

The measure died in the Senate before the session expired and the matter was shuffled aside during 2020’s pandemic-scrambled session.

This week, however, the Senate began deliberating on the Haffner’s proposal when the Commerce, Consumer Protection, Energy and the Environment Committee staged a two-hour hearing on HB 527’s Senate companion, Senate Bill 508, filed by Sen. Jason Bean, R-Holcomb.

HB 527 and SB 508 were filed on behalf of landowners, mostly agricultural interests, who oppose the proposed project.

Monroe County Commissioner Marilyn O’Bannon, a farmer, said she was never consulted when Invenergy set forth its proposed powerline path.

“The proposed line runs through approximately five miles through the middle of all the farms my family owns, all tillable land,” she told the panel Wednesday.

But Ava Mayor Burrely Loftin said his town of 3,000 residents could save as much as $267,000 a year in energy costs once the Grain Belt Express project is completed.

“That’s a lot for a poor community like ours,” he said

Not all farmers in the eight counties oppose the project. Dawn Ingles, a Randolph County farmer, said the Grain Belt Express will bring $700,000 a year in tax revenue needed for local schools and noted the new transmission lines would help the state’s power grid that suffered rolling blackouts during February’s deep freeze.

The committee is expected to vote on SB 508 next week but, as Sen. Bill White, R-Joplin, noted, the Grain Belt Express project has already been legally approved by the PSC survived past attempts to derail it and withstood court challenges.

In a statement, Invenergy’s Beth Conley reiterated White’s sense of inevitable Deja vu.

“The bipartisan Missouri Public Service Commission unanimously approved the Grain Belt Express as a public utility project because of the tremendous public benefit it will bring to the Show-Me-State,” Conley said in a statement.

The Grain Belt Express is Missouri’s “largest energy infrastructure project (that) will provide payments to landowners and local communities, support 1,500 construction jobs over three years, deliver millions in annual energy savings for 39 Missouri communities, and bolster electric reliability to help avoid future emergency outages,” she continued.

More than 40 percent of project landowners in Missouri and Kansas “have already voluntarily signed easement agreements and received upfront payments from Grain Belt Express of more than $5 million,” Conley said.

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