By AMANDA SCOTT
About 100 residents from across the state, including Calvert County, and members and leaders of environmental groups rallied Wednesday morning at the Robert C. Murphy Courts of Appeal Building in Annapolis to support legal opposition to Dominion Cove Point’s proposed liquefied natural gas exportation project.
In March 2012, Dominion filed for a declaratory judgment in Calvert County Circuit Court regarding the implications of language in a March 2005 contract agreement among Dominion, the Sierra Club and the Maryland Conservation Council. Dominion claimed the contract permits the exportation of LNG, while the Sierra Club claims the contract allows for plant expansion but not LNG exportation.
In January 2013, the court ruled the contract permits the construction, operation and maintenance of additional facilities for the LNG expansion within a particular area of the terminal site in Lusby. The decision further declared that the 2005 agreement permits Dominion to export LNG from the terminal site.
The Sierra Club filed an appeal, and oral arguments began in that case Wednesday in Annapolis, where supporters gathered outside on the court steps chanting for justice and displaying banners and signs calling to “stop Dominion!”
During the rally, Chesapeake Climate Action Network Executive Director Mike Tidwell told the supporters, “You picked a big fight. … This is a facility that will literally change our state. It will knock us off course.”
CCAN, a nonprofit group that fights global warming in the Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C., area, has hosted meetings in Calvert County and sponsored a statewide tour late last year rallying supporters against Dominion’s project.
Tidwell described the proposed $3.8 billion LNG exportation project as a “radical plan proposed by a radical company — Dominion Resources — not because it’s good for us, not because it’s in our best interest, not because it’s good for our economy, not because it protects the health of our children, but because it will make them money, lots of money.”
The director of the Maryland chapter of the Sierra Club, Josh Tulkin, also spoke at the rally, giving those in attendance a brief explanation of the case at hand.
About 30 years ago, he said, the Sierra Club was “set up as protectors” of Cove Point when it reached a settlement with Columbia Gas, which proposed to construct an LNG import terminal at that location.
In 2005, the settlement was updated with Dominion, and “it specifically lays out all the acceptable uses of the facility, and it says that for any use not specified in the contract, it needs explicit approval of the Sierra Club.
“… The Sierra Club doesn’t approve of this project,” Tulkin said, and was followed by shouts of support.
He said the Sierra Club is confident the appeals court will overturn the previous court decision and declare that exporting LNG isn’t a permitted use as per the 2005 agreement.
Lusby resident Sue Allison, who has lived in the Cove Point Woods community near Dominion’s Cove Point terminal since 1977, spoke at the rally, saying the exportation project would make her community “a gas industry sacrifice zone.”
“Why should southern Calvert residents have to get stuck on the smoggy end of a pollution trading deal just so our county commissioners will have an easier time balancing our county budget with Dominion tax dollars?” Allison said. “… Why should our newborn babies … Patuxent Panther high school athletes and our vulnerable seniors at Asbury-Solomons and Solomons Nursing Center have to put up with even more pollution just so Dominion shareholders can get a bigger dividend?”
Allison said she recently told her 16-year-old daughter, who attends Patuxent High School, they might be moving “to get away from the Dominion plant,” and her daughter said “she is not moving anywhere. She thinks she belongs in Cove Point with her friends and her neighbors, and we think [she’s] right.”
Mark Vidor of Baltimore, who held a “no fracking” sign during the rally, said he’s been following the project because he feels that it’s a “major statewide issue” with environmental and safety implications.
“It needs to be stopped,” he said.
CCAN and other opponents of the project have claimed that if the export terminal is built in Lusby, there will be increased pressure for Maryland to permit fracking within state borders.
Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) issued an executive order in 2011 that barred the Maryland Department of the Environment from approving drilling permits until a $1.5 million scientific study (due in 2014) is completed.
Following the rally, the group walked to the front of the State House to stuff documents into passing legislators’ hands, calling for an extension of a statewide fracking moratorium, as the General Assembly began its opening day.
The coalition of protesters called for a bill that would mandate an 18-month review period before the General Assembly could allow any drilling permits, after the pending study concludes.
“Whatever the answers are, we need the science to dictate this,” said Del. Heather Mizeur (D-Montgomery), who spoke at the rally. Mizeur, who is running for governor this year, recently has taken a stance against Dominion’s proposed project.
Many of the protestors and rally speakers voiced concerns with potential gas extraction in the Western Maryland portion of the Marcellus Shale basin and the portion of the Taylorsville basin that extends under part of Southern Maryland, including Prince George’s County.
While protesters handed out pamphlets outside the State House against fracking, there were also stacks of papers outside the chamber rooms supporting natural gas exportation. The pamphlets included the names of some members of the North America’s Building Trades Unions.
Tidwell said another rally is scheduled for Feb. 20 in front of the Maryland Public Service Commission in Baltimore. More details about that rally will be announced soon, he said.
