Save The Maple Tree Farms
Pipeline company seeks court order to remove tree protesters
From an Article by Terrie Morgan-Besecker, Citizens Voice, February 15, 2016
A pipeline company blocked from cutting down maple trees at a Susquehanna County family business seeks a court order to allow state police to remove protesters preventing it from clearing the land.
Catherine Holleran and three other property owners should be held in contempt of court for violating a court order that granted the company permission to fell trees on their New Milford Township property, argues Elizabeth Witmer, attorney for Constitution Pipeline Company.
Loggers for Constitution arrived at the property Wednesday, but were turned away by about 30 protesters, including Megan Holleran, daughter of Catherine Holleran. State police were called, but troopers advised the company they could not remove the protesters without a court order, Witmer says in an emergency motion filed Friday in federal court.
Constitution has been battling the Holleran family and other property owners, Patricia Glover, Dustin Webster and Michael and Maryann Zeffer, regarding the acquisition of property needed to construct a 124-mile natural gas pipeline that will transport natural gas from Susquehanna County to New York and New England.
Constitution offered the property owners more than $3,000, which it says exceeds the appraised value of the land, according to court documents. The owners rejected the offer, arguing the appraisal was not properly done.
That led Constitution to seek to take the property through eminent domain. Judge Malachy Mannion ruled in favor of Constitution on March 17, 2015. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, granted the firm permission last month to fell the trees.
Despite Mannion’s and FERC’s orders, the Hollerans and other protesters have occupied the property, preventing Constitution from cutting the trees by standing in the fall zone, creating a safety risk, Witmer says in the motion. The protesters interference threatens the pipeline project as the FERC order requires the trees be cut by March 31 so not to affect migratory birds.
Contacted Monday, Megan Holleran said she wants to halt the cutting of the trees until a federal appellate court in New York rules on a separate challenge to the pipeline project that was filed by a group known as Stop the Pipeline. That case challenges FERC’s approval of the project. While it’s not directly related to her family’s dispute, the outcome of the New York case could impact their case, she said.
“While that’s still pending we think it’s premature to take action on our land,” she said. “If they cut the trees too soon, it’s an error you can’t take back.”
Megan Holleran said the protests have been peaceful. She was surprised Constitution filed the emergency motion.
“We are not doing anything illegal or to try to inspire a conflict,” she said. “We had an extremely polite interaction. … I asked them to leave and they did.”
Witmer stressed Constitution is not seeking to bar the property owners from continuing their protest, so long as they do so peacefully and do not interfere with the loggers or otherwise pose a safety threat.
The property owners will have an opportunity to respond to the motion. Witmer requested Mannion rule on the matter as soon as possible given the deadline the company faces to fell the trees.
See also on You Tube: Constitution Pipeline Eminent Disruption Marcellus Shale Reality Tour Part 13
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Private property belongs to the owner, not the courts, the judge, not the pipeline company, not the state, not the country.
The owner, and the owner alone should decide what can and cannot be done with his or her property. Preserve it, lease it, sell it, should be his or her choice!
Eminent domain, no matter how it’s looked at, is abuse. Eminent domain for private gain is legalized robbery and nothing else! It’s unconstitutional. It’s against what America stands for: life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness!
Sheriffs, state police, LEOs should not, not ever!, act against the people when all they are doing is defending their rights and property! This should not even be an issue.
The judge should never rule in favor of the Constitution pipeline, he should rule in favor of THE CONSTITUTION and defend the rights of We The People!
http://www.naturalgasintel.com/articles/105455-pennsylvania-judge-orders-resumption-of-constitution-pipeline-tree-felling
Pennsylvania Judge Orders Resumption of Constitution Pipeline Tree Felling
From NGI News, February 24, 2016
A federal district court judge in Pennsylvania has ordered tree-clearing activities for the proposed Constitution natural gas pipeline to proceed, making clear that anyone interfering with the work would be arrested and held in contempt of court.
According to Middle District of Pennsylvania Court records, Constitution Pipeline Co. LLC filed an emergency motion for declaratory judgment on February 12th after more than a dozen opponents of the pipeline blocked the company from accessing two parcels in Susquehanna County, PA, on February 10th. The complaint says the Pennsylvania State Police were called and arrived on the scene but said they would not intervene to allow the tree clearing to occur.
Constitution argued that the pipeline’s opponents should be held in contempt for violating an order from March 2015, which granted the company eminent domain powers and immediate entry and access to properties in New Milford Township for the pipeline.
On Monday, Judge Malachy Mannion said the “after hearing the testimony of Constitution’s witnesses and reviewing its evidence, the court found insufficient evidence to prove that any defendant personally disobeyed” the March 2015 order. But Mannion then authorized the U.S. Marshals Service, or another law enforcement agency, to arrest anyone interfering with the tree felling operations once they resume.
Constitution hopes to finish the tree felling before March 31 to avoid impacting migratory birds and the Northern long-eared bat.
Last month, FERC gave Constitution permission to begin cutting trees in Pennsylvania for its $683 million natural gas pipeline [CP13-499] — which would transport gas from the Marcellus Shale to markets in the northeast — but withheld permission for the clearing of trees in neighboring New York State.
Constitution is owned by subsidiaries of Williams Partners LP, Cabot Oil & Gas Corp., Piedmont Natural Gas Co. Inc. and WGL Holdings Inc. The approximately 124-mile, 30-inch diameter pipeline will transport Marcellus gas produced in northeast Pennsylvania with existing transmission pipelines in Schoharie County, NY, where it would connect with two existing interstate pipelines: Iroquois Gas Transmission and Tennessee Gas Pipeline. It would provide 650,000 Dth/d of takeaway capacity.
Constitution and Leatherstocking Gas Co. LLC have also announced plans to install four delivery taps along the proposed pipeline’s route.
The pipeline will originate in Susquehanna County PA before crossing into New York and traversing Broome, Chenango, Delaware and Schoharie counties.
WILL CLIMATE CHANGE TAP OUT THE MAPLE SYRUP BUSINESS?
Julie Grant, The Allegheny Front, March 4, 2016
NOTE: This story was originally published on March 28, 2014.
Maple trees could be in trouble in the Northeast U.S. in the coming decades. In fact, federal climate models have predicted the region will lose most of its maples by next century. But producers don’t seem worried. Maple syrup prices are high, and with the help of technology, the sap is flowing just fine.
Jason Blocher’s livelihood each year largely depends on the weather in February and March. He’s the third generation in his family to run Milroy Maple Farms in southwestern Pennsylvania.
“You can’t outguess Mother Nature, and she controls everything in this business,” he says.
It takes warm days and cold nights to get sap flowing through a sugar maple. Blocher starts drilling tap holes in the trees when daytime temperatures climb into the 40s and nights are still below freezing. When he was a kid, his family would tap in late February and early March. But he says that’s changed in the past 10 years. Now, they usually tap as much as a month earlier. And the timing is more erratic.
Like most producers, Blocher remembers the winter of 2012. There was a thick layer of snow in his maple forest. Then, right as syruping was starting, temperatures shot up into the 80s. It was the warmest March on record.
“So we went from fighting our way through three or four feet of snow—and anticipation of a very good season because of that heavy snow pack—to one of our poorest seasons we have on record,” Blocher says. “We had such a drastic change in the weather in a matter of two to three weeks. It ruined our season.”
Milroy Farms wasn’t alone. Syrup production throughout the Northeast was down as much as 40 percent in 2012.
Erratic years like that aren’t a surprise to Dave Cleaves, the climate change advisor at the U.S. Forest Service. It’s a job where it means he’s often the bearer of bad news. “God, in this job I’m in, people hate to see me coming,” he says. “They run like hell.”
About 15 years ago, Cleaves’ agency published a Climate Change Tree Atlas, which explored the potential habitat shifts for 134 tree species. And what it found didn’t look good for sugar maples in the Northeast. “We will see it gradually disappear—or become less prominent,” he says.
Cleaves says southern Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Maryland are on the southern edge of large-scale maple syrup production. As the climate changes, they’re the first places that will have troubles with maple trees. “There are other more aggressive and adaptive southern species that are always there ready to take off and regenerate,” Cleaves says.
Milroy Farms owner Jason Blocher says his maple grove grows along Mt. Davis, the highest point in Pennsylvania. That gives trees the colder temperatures they like, so he doesn’t get too worked up about climate change.
“You hear about that all the time. But I think the sugar maple is a very hardy tree—and very adaptable. So I think under slight changes, it will adapt.”
Some of the top maple syrup researchers in Vermont and New York agree with Blocher. Temperatures in the Northeast already have risen an average of two degrees Fahrenheit since 1970, and yet maple syrup production is booming. Blocher, like most producers, uses vacuum tubing to pull sap from the maple trees. This, coupled with other technologies, allows him to double production in half the time.
Michael Farrell is a maple syrup expert at Cornell University and runs a sugar bush—a tree stand used for maple syrup—in northern New York. In his book, The Sugarmaker’s Companion, he says newer forest models, which take factors other than climate into account, show that the U.S. Forest Service’s predictions may overstate the threat to maple trees. And his own research backs that up.
“We’re not getting replaced by oaks and hickories up here in the Northeast,” he says. “It’s very unlikely that that’s going to happen. And the foresters down in the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest, where there’s a lot of oak and hickory, they’re concerned that they’re not getting the regeneration of oak and hickory. A lot of them consider sugar and red maple invasive species down there.”
“You hear about that all the time. But I think the sugar maple is a very hardy tree—and very adaptable. So I think under slight changes, it will adapt.”
But that’s not what the Forest Service is seeing in the long term. Dave Cleaves says maple producers and researchers may be experiencing good times now, but Forest Service studies that look at changes in the woodlands every few years don’t find many maple saplings in the Northeast. “When they actually get down on the ground and count the seedlings by species, then they get an idea of what the future forest is likely to look like,” Cleaves says.
Cornell researcher Michael Farrell says the biggest danger to young sugar maples is deer, which can eat at the saplings. And syrup producer Jason Blocher is more concerned about invasive insects, like the Asian Longhorned Beetle, than warming temperatures.
But the Forest Service’s Dave Cleaves says problems like these are intertwined with climate change. “It’s not just the changing climate itself that [has an] impact,” he says. “It works through these stressors that are already there. Say it’s moisture stress on the forest if it gets too dry; or if it gets wetter and moister, and that’s more conducive to insect and disease proliferation, then it’s working through insect and disease.”
At Milroy Farms, Jason Blocher says there’s nothing he can do about global warming, so he doesn’t worry about it. But some forest researchers go so far as to call the maple tree a poster child for climate change in the Northeast. They say it’s a resilient tree that might not make it unless efforts to cut greenhouse gases take root.
http://www.alleghenyfront.org/will-climate-change-tap-out-the-maple-syrup-business/