Xcel Energy has been spreading more than their share in their “acquisition” of land for their CapX 2020 transmission project.  They’ve been lowballing landowners, and worse, when landowners elect “Buy the Farm” under Minn. Stat. 216B.12, Subd. 4, Xcel Energy is claiming that they’re not entitled to “minimum compensation” and ” relocation” under Chapter 117 eminent domain laws, and in some cases they’re even saying that their “Buy the Farm” elections are not valid.

Corrective bills have been introduced in both the Minnesota House and Senate:

HF 338

SF 183

Contact the House Energy Committee members and ask them to pass the bill out of committee — landowners need these changes to Buy the Farm NOW!  As members of the Energy Committee it’s their job to represent all of us in Minnesota, it’s their job to protect our Constitutional Rights to just compensation!

rep.melissa.hortman@house.mn, rep.will.morgan@house.mn, rep.pat.garofalo@house.mn, rep.susan.allen@house.mn, rep.joe.atkins@house.mn, rep.mike.beard@house.mn, rep.andrew.falk@house.mn, rep.tom.hackbarth@house.mn, rep.frank.hornstein@house.mn, rep.tim.kelly@house.mn, rep.sandra.masin@house.mn, rep.duane.quam@house.mn, rep.peggy.scott@house.mn, rep.yvonne.selcer@house.mn, rep.barb.yarusso@house.mn, bob.eleff@house.mn

District Courts have been siding with landowners, and Xcel Energy has gone to the Appellate Court, which sided with Xcel, and so now it’s at the Supreme Court.  Supreme Court Oral Arguments are scheduled for April 3, 2013.

Dairy Star — Schwartzes looking to relocate dairy

And in the St. Paul Pioneer Press:

Farmers want power company buyouts

By Leslie Brooks Suzukamo
lsuzukamo@pioneerpress.com

Posted:   02/12/2013 12:01:00 AM CST

Updated:   02/12/2013 10:19:18 PM CST

Julie and Dale Schwartz have a 100-cow dairy farm in Sibley County that has been in Dale’s family for three generations. It might not make it to the fourth, they say.

A group of 11 regional power utilities is laying one of the state’s newest high-voltage lines from Brookings, S.D., to Hampton, Minn., in a project called CapX2020. It runs down the driveway to the Schwartzes’ house and near their cows.

The Schwartzes fear stray voltage and the electromagnetic field from the power line will harm their cows and themselves, so they want the utilities to buy out a 160-acre section of their 575-acre farm so they can relocate themselves and their cows. Selling just the 150-foot right-of-way won’t satisfy them.

“They talk about a safe distance — we don’t have a safe distance,” Julie Schwartz told members of the Minnesota House Energy Committee on Tuesday, Feb. 12. “We work there and live there.”

So the couple invoked a little-used 1970s law dubbed “Buy the Farm” that allows farmers to force utilities to buy an entire farm if necessary to clear the way for high-voltage transmission projects.

The law grew out of ferocious power line battles in the early 1970s between utilities and farmers that required state troopers to intervene.

Now the power line battles are back. The Schwartzes were one of three farm operators who testified Tuesday that “Buy the Farm” needs to be strengthened.

Their attorneys charge CapX2020 leaders Twin Cities-based Xcel Energy and

Great River Energy are dragging their feet and refusing to follow the law in hopes of waiting out the farmers and making them take lesser offers. “People get to the point where they’re so tired, they just capitulate,” attorney Kirk Schnitker said. “They’re like, ‘Just pay me and get me on my way.’ And I think (the utilities) know that.”

Specifically, the farmers are backing a bill authored by Rep. David Bly, DFL-Northfield, that calls for the utilities to pay relocation costs and compensation to make the farmers whole again.

Minnesota law already provides for relocation and make-whole compensation for eminent domain takings in other cases, and it’s implied in the existing Buy the Farm law, Schnitker said.

Bly’s bill also calls for the utilities to file any challenge to a “Buy the Farm” claim within 60 days to prevent stalling, Schnitker said.

The utilities believe the changes are unnecessary and could add to the costs of the projects, said Great River Energy’s Dan Lesher, the route and land rights leader for CapX2020’s Brookings project.

The CapX2020 consortium expects to spend more than $2 billion on its five high-voltage projects across the state. The Brookings line will be put into operation in July 2015.

The utilities want the Legislature to wait until the Minnesota Supreme Court rules on a case that could decide whether the utilities should pay the relocation and compensation. A decision is expected in summer.

The utilities dispute that payments for relocation and compensation are part of the existing law and want the Supreme Court to clarify that. “There is a framework, but there is not a lot of definition — there is not a lot of meat behind that framework,” Lesher said.

The House committee took no action on the matter Tuesday.

In the TC Daily Planet:

‘Buy the Farm’ changes fair to farmers, or too expensive?