{"id":18653,"date":"2012-09-26T11:06:01","date_gmt":"2012-09-26T16:06:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/?p=18653"},"modified":"2012-09-27T23:30:15","modified_gmt":"2012-09-28T04:30:15","slug":"whats-next-after-the-keystone-xl-pipelines-latest-court-victory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/2012\/09\/26\/whats-next-after-the-keystone-xl-pipelines-latest-court-victory\/","title":{"rendered":"What’s Next After the Keystone XL Pipeline’s Latest Court Victory"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photo by Dave Fehling\/StateImpact Texas<\/p>

Jefferson County Court at Law Judge Tom Rugg listens to arguments in the property rights case earlier this month.<\/p><\/div>\n

Another court case appears to be breaking in favor of the Keystone XL pipeline<\/a>, which will take heavy crude harvested in Canadian sand pits to refineries on the Texas Gulf Coast.<\/p>\n

On Tuesday,\u00a0Judge Tom Rugg<\/a> of Jefferson County Court at Law 1 indicated that he believes TransCanada, the Canadian company behind the pipeline, has the right to begin building the Keystone XL<\/a> on private land near Beaumont, Texas.\u00a0Houston brothers David and James Holland own the land. They lease some 4,000 acres out for rice farming and ranching under a group called Texas Rice Land Partners. There are already dozens of pipelines on their land, but they feel TransCanada low-balled them with their offer to build the pipeline<\/a> across it. The company is trying to use eminent domain<\/a> to go ahead and build it anyways.<\/p>\n

But they can’t take the land just yet. The writ of\u00a0possession<\/a>\u00a0— the ruling that would give TransCanada the right to seize the land — hasn’t been issued. That will likely come down in a hearing Friday, according to the Judge.<\/p>\n

“If the bond issues are sorted out, I believe under the law that the pipeline is allowed a writ of possession,” Judge Rugg tells StateImpact Texas. (Reading Judge Rugg’s ruling<\/a> will make your head hurt. And he sympathizes with that.\u00a0\u201cIt is such a complex thing that we\u2019re dealing with that I just didn\u2019t know how to make it simpler,\u201d the judge says.)<\/p>\n

Those bond issues that will be addressed Friday\u00a0deal with how much TransCanada needs to put up in a bond. That’s a payment that TransCanada sets aside in case they ultimately lose their court battle against the landowners to cover damage from construction of the pipeline. Right now that bond is set at $5,000. And the landowners feel that isn’t enough.<\/p>\n

‘Here’s Where it Gets Troublesome’<\/h4>\n

There’s a lot of uncharted water here in challenging the bond amount, according to Judge Rugg. “Here\u2019s where it gets a little troublesome,” Judge Rugg says. “This is an area that has almost never been litigated in the history of condemnation litigation in the state.” And that’s just the\u00a0beginning.<\/p>\n

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