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February 7th, 2016 
Awake Goy 
Print FriendlyAbove photo: Landowners and environmental groups gather for a news conference to call on the DEC to stop the Constitution gas pipeline on Tuesday, Aug. 11, 2015, at the Legislative Office Building in Albany, N.Y. By Cindy Schultz in The Times Union.
With the $700 million Constitution Pipeline project held up by New York environmental regulators, the company began clearing the pathway near the project’s starting point in Pennsylvania on Friday after getting permission to do so from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
Meanwhile, in two separate legal actions, Stop the Pipeline and the Delaware-Otsego Audubon Society filed notices in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in the opening volley of civil court challenges to FERC’s decision to issue a certificate of necessity to the natural gas transmission project.
The opponents had been prevented from mounting a court challenge to the pipeline project until FERC last week denied their formal request for a rehearing on the certification decision issued in December 2014. The new legal challenges were brought against FERC, not the pipeline company.
“This is the first step in a long process,” said Anne Marie Garti, a Stop the Pipeline activist and environmental lawyer who was involved in preparing the challenge to FERC’s decisions.
Garti is also part of the Pace Environmental Litigation Clinic, which represented Stop the Pipeline in the notice. The Delaware-Otsego Audubon Society joined with Catskill Mountainkeeper, the Sierra Club and the Clean Air Council in its notice challenging the FERC action.
Constitution Pipeline spokesman Chris Stockton confirmed that crews hired by the company began felling trees “at various locations” along the pipeline route in the vicinity of Brooklyn Township, Susquehanna County.
“We have been coordinating closely with the affected property owners and we are committed to performing this work in a safe, efficient and environmentally responsible manner,” Stockton said in response to questions from The Daily Star.
The Daily Star file. This January 2013 map from Constitution Pipeline shows the company’s preferred routes for the project.
In New York, the company’s attempt to get federal permission to begin clearing trees along the 124-mile route has hit a roadblock. While FERC has not detailed its reasons for delaying action on the tree-clearing request in New York, the agency has pointed out the company has received all needed permissions from the state of Pennsylvania.
The New York attorney general’s office has pressed FERC to refrain from granting the approval needed for the tree work to begin in New York counties pending a decision from the state Department of Environmental Conservation on water quality permits sought by the Constitution Pipeline.
The company insists that removing the trees with non-mechanized means would pose no threat to the purity of nearby waters.
Meanwhile, a cadre of anti-pipeline activists, including some from the Oneonta region and the Southern Tier, converged on Susquehanna County to demonstrate against the tree clearing. They called on “defenders” to go to the site, suggesting a protest could slow down the tree clearing and hurt the public image of Williams Partners, one of the leading investors in the project, as it gets ready to report its quarterly earnings to investors.
Garti maintained that FERC has failed to documented a need for the gas that would be moved in the pipeline and violated the federal Clean Water Act by issuing a certificate to the project while state regulators have yet to approve water quality certificates.
“We’re challenging all of their orders,” she said.
Stockton said the pipeline project and the route that it takes to get to a compressor station in the Schoharie County town of Wright “were carefully reviewed and analyzed by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission over a nearly three-year process.”
The project is separate from the Northeast Energy Direct (NED) pipeline that has been proposed more recently by the Tennessee Gas Co., a subsidiary of Kinder Morgan. That project has not yet received federal certification although a study of its environmental impacts has begun.
The NED project calls for a natural gas compressor station in Franklin and is expected to result in a new gas-fired power plant to be constructed, though the site of the latter project has not been disclosed.
Source Article from https://www.popularresistance.org/group-sues-feds-to-stop-pipeline/
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