A public policy dispute over plans for about 1,000 miles of carbon dioxide pipeline across Iowa took a concerning turn last week. The pipeline company’s latest tactic demonstrates why Iowa should finally pass an anti-SLAPP statute that has been floating around the Legislature for a few years.
Iowa Capital Dispatch and the Des Moines Register reported that Summit Carbon Solutions, an Ames company founded by businessman Bruce Rastetter, sent letters to six opponents of its plans to use eminent domain authority to build the pipeline. With eminent domain, Summit could force landowners along the route to sell easements to the company so it could bury the proposed 2-foot-diameter pipe across their land.
The letters demand the recipients retract what Summit claims are false and defamatory statements the six critics have made and cease making similar comments in the future. The letters warn recipients their statements have “exposed you to significant legal liability.”
The Cedar Rapids Gazette reported the recipients are Steve King, the former congressman from Kiron; Jess Mazour of Des Moines, an official of the Sierra Club of Iowa; Barb Kalbach of Dexter and Tom Mohan of Cedar Rapids, both members of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement; Robert Nazario of Iowa Falls, like King, a member of the Free Soil Foundation, and Trent Loos, a Litchfield, Neb., farmer and podcaster.
The Summit project and the underlying eminent domain controversy are textbook examples of the kind of public policy issues the nation’s founders had in mind when they wrote the First Amendment in 1789. Freedom of speech was added to the Constitution to ensure people had the right in the new nation to offer their observations and opinions on important public policy matters.
