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Charles City Area Development Corp. puts pipeline easement decision on hold

Charles City Area Development Corp. puts pipeline easement decision on hold
Scott Melliere and Emily Garden, representing the Charles City Area Development Corp.’s 2022 Business Plan Competition judging team, award the $2,500 prize to Darci Tracey (right), owner of Prologue Books & Wine in Charles City. The contest is for persons starting a new business or entering a new phase of a business. Prologue is celebrating its one-year anniversary currently, and Tracey said it’s been a great first year. “This community has really come forward and supported me. I sold over 8,000 titles in books this year, in our small community. It’s just exceeded my expectations, and I have more planned for the future. More of the same and continue to expand with events and things to draw all sorts of people into the bookstore,” she said. “This will help a lot with offsetting start-up costs and all that it takes to get a small business going.”
By Bob Steenson, bsteenson@charlescitypress.com

The Charles City Area Development Corp. meeting Wednesday morning had something that it rarely has – an audience.

The reason for the visit by about half a dozen concerned area residents was an agenda item regarding a board discussion on an easement offer for a carbon dioxide pipeline to run through the organization’s Avenue of the Saints Development Park.

The CCADC’s Asset Management Committee had reportedly agreed to recommend that the organization accept Summit Carbon Solutions latest offer – which was revealed at the meeting to be $299,000 – but at the end of a lengthy discussion the full board voted to table a decision on the easement proposal indefinitely with no “nay” votes heard in the voice vote.

Ron Litterer, the CCADC board president and a member of the Asset Management Committee, said that group had put considerable work in over the past couple of months negotiating with Summit, looking at options and asking questions, resulting in “substantial changes in compensation” and an agreement to run the new CO2 pipeline near an already existing natural gas pipeline, which could reduce the impact of the pipeline on the development park.

But Tim Fox, the CCADC executive director, said he could not in good conscience recommend that the full board approve an easement.

He referred to a letter that he had written and sent to the Iowa Utilities Board (IUB) in October, that had been approved by the CCADC, outlining the CCADC’s objections to the Summit Carbon pipeline in its planned route through Charles City and through the development park.

The letter said that while the CCADC is neutral to the carbon sequestration pipeline issue, “we hold substantial concerns pertaining to its location.”

The letter noted that the proposed pipeline would bisect the development property, which, because of its location near the Avenue of the Saints highway and because it has been approved as a shovel-ready Iowa Certified Site, is “one of the most marketable industrial sites in the Midwest.”

“We hold that this action would obviate the marketability of this property. Not only does it render the developmental suitability of the northernmost 24 acres practically naught, but we also have no means to measure the potentially nullifying impacts the presence of a sequestration line would have upon sales potential. Corporate concerns regarding safety or site layout or constructability may override the superior qualities of the site – especially when it comes down to relatively equal sites, one having a pipeline and one without,” Fox’s letter said.

“The community has worked extraordinarily hard in developing a marketable site. We feel the site shall be exponentially more difficult to market and sell given the pipeline presence,” it said.

The letter also said that the proposed pipeline would be too close to a “family farm, the Cedar Valley Transportation Center, two nursing homes, a grocery store, one of the largest automobile dealerships in Iowa, two hotels, a strip mall, a dental office, a potential site of a Career Academy, a bank, and is one-half mile from the Floyd County Medical Center and Charley Western Recreational Trail.”

“Pipeline siting is clearly too close to densely populated areas from safety perspectives,” the letter said, also pointing out its proximity to the Southwest Development Park where there are currently almost 1,300 employees and will in the future be almost 1,400 employees when big expansion projects announced by Zoetis and Cambrex are completed.

“Clearly from a public safety perspective this condition is untenable,” the letter concludes.

At Wednesday’s meeting, Fox said he has looked at the proposed easement from every conceivable aspect for the last several months.

“I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time looking at it, including a few sleepless nights, and I am not ready to retract our statements of Oct. 26, 2022. That was the opinion of the board at that time. I wrote the letter. I think it’s a good letter. I think it sums up what we wanted to convey and I don’t know what’s changed in the interim other than they threw a few bucks at us,” Fox said, adding, “Honestly, the few bucks aren’t enough.”

He said he hated to contradict the people on the Asset Management Committee, but he can’t support the easement based on what it would do to the marketability of the Avenue of the Saints Development Park and the safety concerns.

“I would be remiss in my professional and ethical obligation to not only the board but to my profession” if he went back on the statement that had been made in the letter to the IUB, Fox said.

Several of the people in the audience also spoke against the proposed CCADC easement and/or the pipeline projects in general, including George Cummins, a landowner who would be affected by the pipeline projects and who has been a consistent and outspoken opponent, and Mark Kuhn, who was recently elected as the Floyd County supervisor for Supervisor District 1.

Both of those men referred to parts of Fox’s letter to the IUB, as well as making other points.

Several members of the CCADC board – who are all business people or public officials – asked if there was any danger in the easement payment offer being reduced if they waited to make a decision.

Other members said that was unlikely, since IUB hearings on Summit’s request for a pipeline license haven’t even been set yet, and the question of whether eminent domain can be used to force easements on property owners also hasn’t been ruled on.

The board approved a motion to table the discussion indefinitely.

Also at the meeting Wednesday, the board:

• Announced that Darci Tracey, owner of Prologue. Books & Wine, was the winner of the group’s business plan competition, winning the $2,500 prize.

• Approved the 28E agreement between public bodies for the communications and marketing partnership with the Charles City School District, Floyd County and the city of Charles City, which has been discussed several times by all the member bodies. Charles City City Administrator Steve Diers said representatives of the four bodies plan to meet for the first time Friday (today)  to go over with Communications Director Justin DeVore what their expectations are and what is the potential for the position.

• Approved providing a $22,500 forgivable loan as part of the local match for state economic incentives for a $6.5 million Cambrex project that will add at least 40 new jobs.

• Heard a report by Diers and by Mayor Dean Andrews that the Pure Prairie Farms chicken processing plant had been in operation since Nov. 16 and was slowly ramping up its production.

Andrews said he had talked with Pure Prairie Farms President and CEO Brian Roelofs recently and Roelofs said they could process 65,000 chickens a day at full capacity with the initial workforce. The first day they processed about 20,000 birds in an eight-hour shift, and a week later they were processing that many in two hours.

“They’re working out the kinks,” Andrews said. “He said, ‘The first day we had 20 things to fix, the next day we had 10 things to fix and the next day we had five things to fix,’ so he was pretty pleased with their startup so far.”

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