Sent this morning to the Suwannee Board of County Commissioners. They meet 6PM tonight, 5 April 2016, at the Suwannee County Judicial Annex, 218 Parshley St. SW, Live Oak, FL, and Sabal Trail is on the agenda.

Dear Chairman Bashaw and Commissioners,

Thank you for coming to see with your own eyes at Suwannee River State Park and Falmouth Spring some of what Sabal Trail did not tell FERC. As you know, after that site visit, the Hamilton Board of County Commissioners sent a letter to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers inviting them to come see for themselves, as well.

Despite what Sabal Trail and FPL will tell you, pipelines are not inevitable.

As you may be aware, on March 22 the Georgia House of Representatives voted 34 ayes to 128 nays to deny Sabal Trail easements to drill under Georgia rivers, including the Withlacoochee River. The bill then passed the full legislature without those easements.

That same day, the Georgia House approved an eighteen month moratorium on eminent domain for petroleum products pipelines, pending revision of procedures for environmental review. The next week, Kinder Morgan cited that moratorium and suspended its Palmetto petroleum products pipeline which would have drilled under all Georgia coastal rivers to Jacksonville, Florida.

That is the same Kinder Morgan that owns part of Florida Gas Transmission, which has applied to FERC for a Jacksonville Expansion Project that would ship Sabal Trail natural gas from Suwannee County to Jacksonville. A project that much evidence indicates was planned from the beginning of Sabal Trail, yet was not considered along with Sabal Trail in the Southeast Market Pipelines Project (SMPP), despite a U.S. District Court ruling that FERC must follow the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and consider cumulative effects of related pipelines without segmenting projects.

Please find attached a letter from WWALS to the Corps that also calls attention to further discrepancies in Georgia, and to several related projects in Alabama, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Florida that were not considered cumulatively with the Southeast Market Pipelines Project (SMPP). Finally, FERC’s allegation that the market could have chosen solar power but did not is refuted by recent solar power developments. Therefore WWALS Watershed Coalition, Inc. requests the Corps to examine these numerous developments, especially by site visits on the ground in Georgia and Florida, and to reject any permit for SMPP prior to such examination.

I look forward to seeing your discussion tonight in Live Oak.

Please come to tonight’s SBOCC meeting if you can.

-jsq

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