By RICHIE DAVIS
Greenfield Recorder Staff
ORANGE – As Massachusetts environmental officials negotiate with Tennessee Gas Pipeline Co. about alternatives to its main proposed route across Massachusetts, one private forest owner has raised concerns that a new alignment to avoid state-owned conservation land could jeopardize his own protected timber land.
The recently announced “Article 97 Avoidance Route” and “Article 97 co-location Route Alternative” describe conservation lands protected under the Massachusetts Constitution, for which a two-thirds legislative vote would be required to allow a pipeline. Land protected under Article 97 includes private farmland under Agricultural Preservation Restriction covenants as well as private land with conservation restrictions purchased by the state, according to land trust directors and at least one legislator who is among those who have promised to work to keep the Legislature from granting the two-thirds approval needed for release of the protected lands.
Orange forest owner Fred Heyes said he is concerned, based on Tennessee Gas Pipeline maps filed on Nov. 5 with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that appear to show that the pipeline could be moved off state-protected woodland onto his protected forestland.
“They skirt around public land, and in so doing, they impact numerous private landowners,” said Heyes, who maintains that he owns four parcels of wooded property that could be affected by a potential shift in the route. Tennessee Gas Pipeline emphasizes that remains uncertain and will continue to be in flux pending the company’s efforts to examine alternatives and have discussions with representatives of the state.
Heyes, who believes Tennessee Gas Pipeline will not bow to Article 97 requirements, said a couple of his parcels are protected by conservation restrictions, yet he is more concerned about another parcel in Orange where the pipeline path would run close to three houses, 2,000 feet of road frontage and two wetlands instead of an adjacent Fish and Wildlife property, “an area that has no natural heritage, no old growth, no wetlands, smooth flat ground.”
“If this is public good, public need, this should be reasonably laid out to not impact private landowners,” said Heyes.
In its federal filing, Tennessee Gas Pipeline has described two route alternatives that it says would avoid Article 97 properties — one of them veering southward off the main route in the Berkshires, cutting through Hampshire County instead of across Ashfield, and then following the high-tension power line east in Conway and continuing along the right-of-way south of the primary route.
The alternatives — along with a third alternative through southern New Hampshire — were also the subject of a Nov. 7 letter to area legislators, along with maps of those proposals, describing “viable” paths that are being pursued.
Tennessee Gas Pipeline spokesman Richard Wheatley, asked whether the three routes highlighted in that letter are preferred over the alternatives under consideration — including alignments along the Mohawk Trail, the Massachusetts Turnpike or an existing pipeline in the state’s southern tier — responded, “I am not going to characterize routing at this time, as the evaluation of the alternatives continues.”
Although Heyes questions whether Tennessee Gas Pipeline will ultimately pay attention to the state’s restriction against use of protected conservation land, Rep. Stephen Kulik, D-Worthington, said, “Whether FERC can or should overrule a provision of the Massachusetts Constitution is a big, serious issue that could get tied up in litigation for years. It shouldn’t be a slam-dunk.”
He said that if Heyes is correct that the state, in negotiating to move the pipeline route off protected land, has the effect of moving it onto adjacent environmentally sensitive property, “he may have a valid point.”
Kulik added, “Perhaps the most vulnerable potential impact of the (state) negotiations might be on landowners whose property don’t have any conservation restrictions on them.”
Franklin Land Trust Executive Director Richard Hubbard added, “The problem with this whole issue of the pipeline is whose ox is being gored? We talk about getting it off conservation land, yet that means somebody else is going to be impacted. It’s going to be very hard for this thing to go through out this way without impacting conservation land,” and yet, he emphasized, it is not difficult to have the route zig-zag around sensitive areas.
Mount Grace Land Trust Executive Director Leigh Youngblood said that unlike other Article 97 issues, in which the state has grown increasingly vigilant about protecting sensitive lands, the pipeline issue involves dozens of properties and hundreds of acres that need to be protected, in part to keep blocks of contiguous forest from being “perforated.”
“Nothing like this been seen in a really long time,” she said.
The route preferred by Tennessee Gas Pipeline would go through Plainfield and nine Franklin County towns, including Deerfield.
