Private CO2 Pipeline Company Served 100s Of Eminent Domain Suits Against SD Farmers; Then Farmers Pushed Back
MANSFIELD, S.D. (AP) — Jared Bossly was planting soybeans one spring night in 2023 on his 2,000-acre farm in South Dakota when he spotted a sheriff’s vehicle parked at the corner of his property. He had a hunch it wasn’t a social visit. “I’m like, ‘Well, I doubt he’s just being a friendly neighbor, giving a guy a beer at eight o’clock at night,’” said Bossly, 43. He was right. The sheriff’s deputy served him court papers. Summit Carbon Solutions, the company behind a massive proposed carbon pipeline, was suing Bossly to use his land for the project through eminent domain, which is the taking of private property with compensation to the owner.
“He gives me a stack of papers about like this,” Bossly said, stretching his hands several inches. “They started the process of suing us to take our land.” Bossly is one of many landowners who were sued by Summit Carbon Solutions as it unleashed a barrage of eminent domain legal actions in South Dakota to obtain land for the nearly $9 billion pipeline spanning five Midwest states.
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Bossly, like some other landowners, battled with Summit in court for months to keep the company from surveying his farm in Brown County, a rural farming stretch of northeastern South Dakota. As Bossly tells it, he found out that Summit’s surveyors had shown up on his property in May 2023 after his wife, home recovering from gallbladder surgery, called him claiming that there were strangers inside the house. (In court filings, Summit’s surveyors said they knocked several times before walking to a different building.) Bossly eventually turned his tractor around for the slow, 10-mile drive home from a neighbor’s farm where he had been planting alfalfa. The company accused him of threatening to kill the surveyors over the phone that day. That landed him in court in front of a judge, who had already ordered landowners not to interfere with Summit’s surveys. But the audience in the courtroom gallery underscored the larger anti-pipeline sentiment brewing in South Dakota: It was packed with farmers rallying in Bossly’s defense. Bossly denies that he made the death threat.
The backlash ultimately had major political consequences in the state. In last year’s primary election, a number of incumbent lawmakers were ousted by candidates opposed to the project. It created an odd political dynamic in the region: Farmers in some of the reddest counties in America joining forces with environmentalists to block a pipeline that was designed to cater to a bedrock Republican constituency – Midwest corn farmers. Bossly proudly hangs a Donald Trump-JD Vance campaign banner from the ceiling of his shop. “They did this all to themselves,” Brian Jorde, an attorney representing landowners, said of Summit. “Their legal plan was, ‘We will force them into submission because the lawsuits will break them.’”
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https://apnews.com/article/summit-carbon-solutions-carbon-capture-pipeline-midwest-lawsuits-landowners-6c410dad59ce4d5d6de5ff4962dd0913