[A]n attorney representing opponents of a Vermont Gas Systems pipeline under construction in Addison County sought Thursday to convince the Public Service Board that a cornerstone agreement with the town of Hinesburg wasn’t valid.
According to James Dumont, Hinesburg select board members approved the agreement after meeting illegally with Vermont Gas representatives.
The select board members also appear to have been unaware of several important clauses in the agreement, Dumont said.
Those clauses would give Vermont Gas or any successor the right to store heavy equipment in a local park, Dumont said. It gives Vermont Gas or its successor the right to mow down foliage, trees and even wetlands, Dumont said.
Hinesburg select board members approved the agreement on the promise that Vermont Gas would bring more than 100 residents free hookups, but Thursday’s testimony showed that for some residents the connection may not be free after all, Dumont said.
“They don’t know what they signed,” Dumont said of Hinesburg select board members after the hearing, “and it conflicts with what they think they signed.”
Company executives say they need to route the $165 million pipeline through a largely unmolested portion of Hinesburg’s Geprags Park because, among other reasons, at this late date they lack the time to secure the easements and additional permits needed to bury it elsewhere.
Dumont contends that Vermont Gas’s sense of urgency — and thus their purported need for that specific location — comes from the fact that until April they relied on a separate document that was also illegitimate because it was drawn up during a separate, previous illegal closed-door meeting of the Hinesburg select board.
However, according to Vermont Gas CEO Don Rendall, the company settled upon that route a long ago and he said both Hinesburg and the state of Vermont were aware of that.
“We — Vermont Gas — designed the route with a great deal of care, and after a great deal of consultation with our environmental partners and others,” Rendall said. During that process, all the necessary contracts and agreements were to have been reviewed by both Hinesburg and the Public Service Board, he said.
Following that, he said, “we reached an agreement with the town, and that agreement was recently reversed, and we were able to achieve a new agreement with the town in July that reaffirmed the route we’ve been talking about for several years.”
Hinesburg is currently attempting to adopt another agreement with Vermont Gas, to replace the one invalidated after previous open-meetings violations came to light. But Dumont says the town’s select board has once again violated Vermont’s open-meetings laws by deliberately excluding the public from meetings where they negotiated the new document’s terms. He’s filed a complaint against the select board members.
In response to Dumont’s complaint, the board voted Thursday night to affirm that they had not broken the law. Dumont may appeal their vote to Superior Court; if he does not, the supposed violation is resolved.
Dumont claims if the board is found in violation that the current agreement with Vermont Gas would be rendered invalid.
The sweeping allowances Dumont alleges are not extraordinary, Rendall said.
“The easement itself is a customary utility agreement,” he said.
Vermont Gas vice president Eileen Similardes rebutted Dumont’s argument that some Hinesburg residents, promised free natural gas hookups as part of the agreement between the company and the town, will actually need to pay for them.
Vermont Gas will install nearly $500,000 worth of distribution line and connections from those lines to residences, she said. The only scenario where a customer might need to pay anything would arise if the line between a residence and the distribution pipe extends more than 100 feet, according to documents the company submitted. This is a rare, Similardes told Public Service Board members.
As for the right to mow down a 50-foot-wide swath of Geprags Park’s, another Vermont Gas employee testified that it may not be required, in part because of the discovery of additional wetlands in the park is leading the company to drill horizontally, 30 to 50 feet below the surface, the entire length of the park.
Witnesses at Thursday’s hearing — both company employees and state staffers — say they never conducted more than what one described as a “cursory” investigation into alternative routes that don’t traverse the park.
The Geprags family gave the property to Hinesburg on the condition that it be used for nothing but education and recreation, and Dumont is arguing in a separate case that these terms disallow the commercial use that three of five Hinesburg select board members are attempting to permit.
The agreement they’ve been attempting to settle with Vermont Gas does not grant the company any title to the land, but provides only that Hinesburg won’t fight the gas company’s attempts to claim an easement through the park by eminent domain.
In other action, the Public Service Board denied a motion by Dumont to have board member Sarah Hoffman recuse herself from the case. Dumont questioned her impartiality because she previously testified in favor of the pipeline in her former role as a Department of Public Service deputy commissioner.
The order noted the appearance of improper conflicts of interest, among judges and administrative adjudicators, ought to be avoided, but said removing judges and administrative adjudicators from the bench for even the appearance of wrongdoing would also work to undermine public confidence in the legal system.
“Although an appearance standard has a place in our law … it is important that it not be overused to the point where ‘recusals would only serve to undermine public confidence in the impartiality of all judges,” the board wrote, quoting an earlier Vermont Supreme Court case. “As the Vermont Supreme Court explained, the ‘appearance test invites judges to rest on appearances, instead of looking deeper.’”
