A county official in northeast Iowa says the announcement that the proposed Navigator pipeline project has been cancelled is great news, but Delaware County Supervisor Shirley Helmrichs says she’s talking with other board members about updating the county’s ordinance regulating how close for-profit pipelines may be built to homes and buildings.
“I’m going to pull out all the ordinances I have from other counties and go through setbacks and we’re going to make them large enough setbacks. It’s not going to be like a 50 foot setback,” Helmrich says. “…We’re going to look at putting things in place rather quickly.”
Navigator’s proposed pipeline would have stretched through about 25 miles of Delaware County. Helmrich says the cancellation has relieved a lot of stress among affected landowners. “It was like a breath of fresh air and a load of a lot of the landowners their backs,” Helmrichs says. “…They were so fearful somebody was going to take their property and not be able to make it functional and the fear of what would happen with that being so close to their homes.”
Helmrichs says she intends to have “serious conversations” with local legislators and urge them to forbid private, for-profit companies from using eminent domain to acquire land from unwilling property owners.
(Reporting by Janelle Tucker, KMCH, Manchester)