Power Plays: Between "Reasonable" and "Rational"

Back on November 17, 2006, when my brother Dylan and I met with Maritime Electric, the utility employees described how they approached several landowners in the process of securing a bypass route. At this meeting they identified weak landowner cooperation as the most significant challenge they faced. However, they also, to our surprise, reaffirmed their commitment to finding a bypass. We discussed the idea of burying the lines, with the idea this would mitigate the visual impact. It would make my mother and others who were more worried about the EMR health risks happy by “burying” their concerns as well. The utility representatives at this meeting were open to discussing all possibilities. After getting their verbal agreement to make greater efforts to mitigate the harm the transmission lines would bring to our community, I asked for and received a written statement confirming this intent.

It is posted here:

Dear Sasha:

"As we discussed at our Friday meeting Maritime Electric is most certainly willing to explore alternative transmission line routing around the Mullally and O'keefe residences [[subsequent correspondence on November 21 amended this statement to include "the residential areas on the Grant Road Hill"] and, yes, if the land under discussion is suitable for an alternative route then we are willing to consider compensation up to $3000\acre. Hopefully our opportunity to speak with you on Friday and take you through all of the steps that we've taken to date to attempt to deal with the concerns of residents in the area has demonstrated that we have, indeed, acted in good faith to date and we will continue to act in good faith. let me know if you'd like to proceed with a meeting with the parties involved [these are landowners who might be willing to an easement].

"I've attached a picture of a "cable to overhead structure" and as we indicated at the meeting this type of structure is unsightly and would run counter to the objectives of keeping the viewscape as unencumbered as possible. Two of these type of structures would be required: one for overhead wire to cable transition on one end and one for cable to overhead wire transition on the other end. A wooden structure would have to be heavily guyed and would not look any better.

[here, in the original, they provided a picture of this structure]

"Further this type of construction is very expensive relative to overhead construction and therefore it is very difficult for us to rationalize the cost of this alternative.

"So we'd prefer to work with you on the "short cut" alternative above. I'll await to hear back from you on the next steps."

Regards,

[Signed, Manager, Engineering]

I then went up home and met with several landowners, taking significant time away from my work to address this important issue. At the end of November, I had another meeting with the utility, a meeting that included senior management. This meeting provided an opportunity to specifically discuss other options for the bypass not considered by Maritime Electric, and identify other landowners who might be amenable to allowing easements. In particular, I pointed out that one landowner, one whom the utility had approached in the spring of 2006, was not given due time to consider the option, and should be approached again.

The Maritime Electric officials and senior management at this meeting were responsive, and after reviewing these options, they confirmed the utility’s willingness to move the poles and revisit the bypass. Again, they provided me, upon my request, with a second statement confirming their intent. It is posted here:

Dear Sasha:

“We appreciated the opportunity to sit down this morning and review new options to have our transmission line bypass the Grant Road area where your family, and other residents, have concerns about their view scape and diminished property values because of the presence of our transmission line.

“You brought two new potential overhead bypass routes to our attention that could be negotiated with landowners on the north side of the Grant Road. We also discussed an underground cable option which we both had some reservations with respect to. We really appreciated the extent of your preparation you had for the meeting--both with respect to the extent of conversations you’ve had with community members and your mapping of potential routes in the area.

“You’ve agreed to share with us the contact information for these new land holders and also to act as a facilitator, if necessary, in the negotiation process and we are appreciative of this.

“As soon as you provide the contact information we will pursue the agreed upon #1 option by contacting the two new landholders and asking for a meeting at their earliest convenience to secure their intention to provide an easement for the transmission line. If this should fail we will then pursue option #2. We will also go to Grant Road as soon as possible to inspect the proposed routes to ensure there are no issues with the topography of the land that would interfere with our construction or future maintenance\emergency access to the line. We commit to keeping you posted on our progress (when meetings are scheduled, what the outcome was, and what our next steps and related timing will be). When you feel it necessary we can meet again to review the new information.

“Sasha, at the beginning of this process Maritime Electric said it would consider any reasonable proposal to address the concerns of residents in the area. We meant it then and we mean it now. We have acted in good faith from the outset and we certainly will continue to do so moving forward and will make a sincere attempt to make one of the above two options work.

“We look forward to receiving the contact information from you and working with you toward a bypass solution for the residents of the Grant Road.”

[Signed, Vice-president, Customer Service]

Please note that in both statements provided above, the focus is on demonstrating “good faith” and establishing goodwill. Goodwill is the word that came up most often in our correspondence and in person at meetings. In the face of government stonewalling, the responsiveness of the utility was very heartening. We decided to work in “good faith” with them, take their statements at face value, and put our trust in them.

So let us see if this trust was well-placed. In the above correspondence, you can see that the utility committed to consider “reasonable” routes and that any process of “rationalization” was very much in the background. What any “rationalization” might mean was, moreover, rather obscure at this juncture, overshadowed as it was by references to “good faith.”

By April 2007, “rationalization” would come to mean this: that the bypass must cost the utility no more than the cost of going along the highway which cuts through our community. But this convenient qualification is absent from the above two statements provided at the end of last November. The term only features above once, with reference to the utility’s consideration of the underground cable. And even in this case, they did not rule out this option last fall, even though it would have definitely cost more than following the route above ground! I am sure careful readers will agree that it is extremely telling how, in the fall of 2006, the utility only said they had a “preference” for working to find an above-ground route.

Their position would harden considerably over the months which followed.

Fiscal considerations were a secondary consideration in our joint attempts over December, January and February, to identify willing landowners for the bypass route. The utility found it convenient to point to community uncooperativeness as the real barrier to a successful bypass, as if money were not the problem at all. Reviewing the statements above, you will see there is some reference to topography, and concerns as to the suitability of the terrain. However, a mid-December email I received from Maritime Electric’s Manager of Operations stated that, after viewing the area suggested for a bypass, that the terrain involved in the two routes under consideration above was suitable for their purposes; it was, in fact, “one they could use.”

Fiscal considerations and difficulty with the terrain featured nowhere in our subsequent debates over using other public-land options. When, in early 2007, I questioned senior management about the possibility of routing the transmission line on three contiguous pieces of government woodland that would enable a transmission line bypass, the objection was not that it would be too expensive, or too difficult to clear, or that government itself was unwilling, but that management “wanted to pursue one route at a time.”

My correspondence with Maritime Electric officials, collected since the end of November 2006, is voluminous. In a previous post I have indicated how carefully I have re-read and gone through this material to see when things started to fall apart—to see when a seemingly cooperative and caring corporation apparently decided to unilaterally drop a stated commitment to bypass Grant Road/Gowan Brae with their high-voltage wires. Having sifted through this archive, I have located the point where their tune shifted. It happened in March. To be exact, the first time that it was intimated that “rationalization” must take place, and that this process of “rationalization” was defined as a zero differential cost re-routing, was on March 13, 2007. This is approximately one week after we finally, successfully, identified landowners who would allow the poles to cross their land to complete the bypass. This perfectly reasonable route was negotiated and brokered in full cooperation with utility employees assigned to this project.

I am a fairly alert and careful person, and I noticed the inclusion of “rationalization” by senior management in email correspondence on March 13, and I questioned use of this new term as soon as I opened the message. Senior management then tried to claim consistency by referring back to the first, original statement given above. But, can any readers see any requirement of a revenue-neutral bypass option in either of the statements?

No, neither can I find one.

So, having established this inconsistency on the part of the utility, and having shown how they again wasted a considerable amount of community time, and my personal time, it still remains for one to explain this frustrating shift. What happened between November and March? What happened to shift the discourse from one which emphasized goodwill, good faith and commitment to one which put money and profit before all else?

Some reasons were given to me on April 20. Having had a number of weeks to think about this, a few other explanations come to mind as well. This post is lengthy enough, so I’ll discuss them all next week. And following from and rising out of these explanations, we will see the beginnings of a clear blueprint for working around such problems, and avoiding these conflicts, in the future. Those individuals who find themselves with new office at that time (there is currently a provincial election in Prince Edward Island) might give them due consideration.

Community Disengagement, Part I

When we realized the transmission line was soon to be a reality on Grant Road/Gowan Brae, my family had a series of discussions about what to do. We determined to get some information on what had transpired over the very quiet summer leading up to the fall crisis, and we decided to find out who was responsible for the failure of this important community commitment. I spoke at length with several neighbours about the bypass activities, then I gathered public documents, met and corresponded with two government employees and various individuals at Maritime Electric. Over time, this is what I have put together.

In April 2006, government officials left the utility to address our problem with the proposed route for the transmission line. Maritime Electric approached the issue by trying to secure easements (a process similar to getting a right of way, but with more options and privileges) over privately-owned land in the area. To make a long story short, they secured verbal agreement with four parties, surveyed a route, paid for a required botanical analysis to ensure the bypass would not disturb rare flora, manage wetland ecosystems, stream crossings and tree canopies. They revised their transmission line extension document, and submitted a new undertaking proposal to government officials, who approved the change.

Here is a copy of the new document:

http://www.gov.pe.ca/photos/original/melectricEIS.pdf

The Appendices of this document are much more extensive than the first, underscoring the emphasis on ecological protection required of off-road bypass construction.

The Grant Road/Gowan Brae bypass is on page 2 of Appendix A.

However, it seems clear that Maritime Electric did not maintain clear lines of communication with all landowners over the summer, and did not have the level of community agreement that they thought they did. Early fall 2006, when the transmission line construction was already well underway, Maritime Electric broke off discussions with one family over their easement terms and shifting ideas of land use, and our bypass initiative fell apart.

I also learned how, with the transmission line coming down the Grant Road, Maritime Electric put the onus on local people to find another landowner to complete the route. This put considerable time pressure on the entire community to come up with a solution, and it put considerable social pressure on several other people approached to provide a fallback route. Not all of these individuals were community residents. One was temporarily working elsewhere. My neighbours told me that, with time slipping away and Maritime Electric crews waiting up the Grant Road, some landowners were given only days to consider the prospect of a high voltage incursion onto their properties. Ultimately, the individuals approached at the last minute were not comfortable with the prospect of signing over land under these conditions without time to consider the impact. Maritime Electric, citing government-imposed deadlines to meet, abandoned the bypass. They worked round the clock after this decision, erecting most poles by the end of October.

People learned of the bypass failure in a variety of ways. Some, the utility called in person. Others learned through word of mouth. Some learned when they actually saw the crews working in front of their homes. Regardless of how they found out, the effects among the people of Grant Road/Gowan Brae were largely the same: we were all feeling deeply frustrated, disempowered, and angry.

When Maritime Electric left Grant Road/Gowan Brae in the fall of 2007, not only did they leave a transmission line behind them, but they left a wake of ill will. The last minute problems with easements, after a summer of inactivity at the community level, coupled with a brinkmanship approach to getting other local people to sign over land for the transmission line, created much social strife. The demoralization was palpable.

People looked back on the events leading up to the advent of the poles, and community consensus was that the eleventh-hour effort of the utility was meant to distract us all from their overall weak level of commitment to broker a fair deal and protect community interests. Many were, and are, of the opinion that Maritime Electric never had any real intention of pursuing a bypass. We all look at the overall money spent on this wind energy installation, and look to the good care taken to protect the interests of individuals who lived close to the turbines. By contrast, what has happened to our community because of the transmission lines stings like a very sharp slap.

The above narrative quite clearly illustrates several ethical problems with how the utility approached the situation. Let me identify at least two of these as revealed thus far.

Ethical Problem 1: Maritime Electric created a problem which it ultimately took no responsibility for solving.

The utility put forth (and the government approved) a flawed transmission route, and then put the onus on local residents of Grant Road/Gowan Brae to find an alternative when we pointed out the potential harm. In this process, the utility relied on local individuals and community spirit to a.) provide them with options, b.) make preliminary inquiries, c.) do most of the communication and legwork and, d.) encourage all to cooperate. Anyone who “buys into” such a process implicitly takes on ownership of the success or failure. Any integrity a community broker might have with local people is ascribed to a utility that has done little to deserve it. I found myself playing this problematic role when I joined in with this endeavour last fall, and I intend to blog about my discomfort over this in the weeks to come.

Adopting this stance also allowed Maritime Electric to remain conveniently non-committal. They could distance themselves from any “problem” with “uncooperative” people, because any lack of cooperation would be seen as evidence that “the community” itself was to blame for the failure of the bypass.

And why should private landowners give up land when other options are available? Readers might be interested to learn that there is government land which might very well have served the purposes of the bypass, which the utility did not consider at all. (More on this, with maps, to follow in another post.)

Ethical Problem 2: Maritime Electric pursued a route over parcels of private land without offering fair market value for this incursion.

When reviewing the above process, it is clear that the utility, quite intentionally, tried to avoid costs associated with paying landowners for using their land. Any discussion of compensation in the spring of 2006, was put well in the background by Maritime Electric officials. I did not learn until very recently that the utility did not offer any compensation to the four original landowners whom they approached to provide easements over the spring of 2006. In recent weeks, when I probed this issue with utility management, they told me that their employees assured all landowners that rates of compensation among participants would be equitable; if one landowner got any money, they all would get a comparable amount. But the utility at the same time admitted that, under the terms of option agreements signed by three landowners in the spring of 2006, these landowners were allowing the transmission line to cross their land for free.

I find it very difficult to believe that Maritime Electric thought this kind of agreement would hold together. And, it irritated me to no end to learn, as part of my meeting on April 20, that Maritime Electric had had a budget for easement compensation in the spring of 2006. One cannot help but wonder if things might have turned out quite differently if they had used it a year ago.

It should be noted again how the presence of community people like me, and others before me, “working with” Maritime Electric puts the utility in a strong negotiating position when it comes to easement discussions.

The reader of this blog might, at this point, ask, “Where is the provincial government in all of this?” The province is a partner, with Maritime Electric, in the new energy initiative this transmission line was supposed to service. What did they do to represent the community, and be an arbiter this conflict?

That side of this story will be told in Community Disengagement, Part II. The continuation of this post will itemize attempts to contact provincial authorities over the fall of 2006, and try to make sense of the disappointing results of our efforts to find help from this quarter. I will also discuss a third ethical issue with how the transmission bypass was reopened and pursued over the winter of 2006 and spring of 2007.