http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/09/25/fighting-keystone-xl-in-the-heart-of-texas/
The Tar Sands Blockade have been active up and down the pipeline route building relationships with landowners and community members set to be most impacted by the project. Over the past few months, many more landowners have joined the cause, are becoming spokespeople and potentially participants in blockades. . . .
In 1999, when native Texan David Hightower retired from the U.S. Air Force, he’d looked forward to a quiet country life. His parents had bought 70 acres north of Winnsboro, TX in 1957 when he was three. Hightower returned to start up a vineyard and plant an orchard. The property now has 500 running feet of productive muscadine grapes as well as peach, pear and persimmon trees.
Unfortunately, TransCanada had other plans. The company approached Hightower’s mother, in her 80’s, with the contract for the pipeline to cross the property. She signed without fully understanding what it would mean. While opposing the pipeline, Hightower didn’t want to add stress to his elderly mother in the last years of her life. She has since passed away.
The Keystone XL pipeline will cut about 200 feet from his front door and plow right through his vineyard and orchard. It will ruin the family business. Hightower talked to representatives about just moving the pipeline over a few feet, so at least the vineyard and trees would be spared. TransCanada refused to change the pipeline route.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Tortured-Law-in-Texas-by-William-Boardman-120929-913.html
Earlier the same week, David Hightower of Winnsboro came to the end of his resistance to the pipeline clearing crews. Hightower, who was living in his childhood home after serving 40 years in the Air Force, had planted a muscadine grape vineyard and nurtured it over the years into a home business. He asked TransCanada to shift the pipeline route. TransCanada wiped out his vineyard. . . .
Meanwhile it leaves people like the Holland family, who are part of Texas Rice Land Partners, already have some 50 or more pipelines on their property, but this is only the second time they've gone to court over the issue of eminent domain. The first time they were plaintiffs in the Denbury case.
TransCanada had offered the Hollands $446,864 for an easement, which the Hollands were prepared to accept on the same terms as their other pipelines. But TransCanada, with a pipeline that would be carrying a far more toxic load than the other pipelines, would not accept the usual terms, but rather wanted to be able to walk away from their pipeline any time, with no liability.
With the court order, the Hollands are to get $20,808, or about 5% of what TransCanada offered, even though a landowners' compensation is supposed to bear some reasonable relationship to fair market value.
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