DES MOINES – In his weekly press conference Monday, Governor Terry Branstad announced he supports the use of eminent domain to take private land for a private company to build an oil pipeline that will bisect the state, generating tens of millions in profit for a single company. The full quote:
“There is a very limited, legitimate reason to use eminent domain for a public purpose – yeah, a pipeline or a road or a bridge, something like that, is a public purpose.”
— Governor Terry E. Branstad, July 14, 2014
In response, the Jack Hatch-Vernon campaign called for Branstad’s colleagues in the Republican Governor’s Association to cease running television advertisements that falsely attack Hatch for taking the position Branstad is taking.
“The Governor should tell the RGA to stop blaming Jack Hatch for something Branstad himself is doing,” Hatch campaign manager Grant Woodard said Monday. “Branstad supports the state taking people’s property to run a commercial pipeline through 17 Iowa counties, creating profit for just one company.”
Woodard called the RGA ads a “classic Republican tactic, which is to blame the opposition for something you are in fact doing.”
Hatch said his 2006 vote against override a Governor’s veto of an eminent domain bill was driven by his belief that urban renewal projects in “blighted” areas of Iowa’s cities need to use eminent domain to continue the revitalization process.
“My district desperately needed to grow, and to do that the City of Des Moines needed to redevelop limited urban renewal district areas, but the bill blocked that important public purpose,” Hatch said. “Urban renewal is exactly the limited way in which eminent domain should be used, not like Branstad is doing, to take some farmer’s property to build a pipeline for some big oil company.”
Hatch stated once again Monday his company, HDG, has never used eminent domain, asked for it to be used, or profited from its’ use. “The statement in the ad that I was ‘enriched’ by the use of eminent domain is not true,” Hatch said.
Also Monday Branstad initially said he learned about the pipeline proposal in the press last week. But later in the press conference he said the proposal has “just come up in the last couple weeks,” which is a different time frame. Press reports on the project began five days ago. Questions remain about when the administration learned of the proposal.
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