Landowner battles with utility over electric lines
Source: Aiken Today, by Tony Baughman
July 20, 2007
WAGENER — The road home for Jean Pesce is a winding, rain-washed ribbon of dirt and gravel through a thick stand of longleaf pines.
"We thought we'd found the perfect place," said Pesce, who moved with her husband from Rockland County, N.Y., seven years ago onto the heavily wooded 39 acres off Brown Pond Road.
Then the power company came calling. Four years ago, representatives from Central Electric Cooperative, a Columbia-based utility, asked to survey the Pesces' land.
"It didn't sound like it was an issue to come and look. Well, they came and cut trees down to look," Pesce said. "Survey means to look it over in my estimation. If you're preparing to put the lines up and you're coming in and cutting, that's a whole different ball game. They insisted that because we gave them permission to survey, we gave them permission to do whatever they wanted on the property."
Soon, construction began on what would become a 115-volt transmission line that now snakes across three counties from Pooles Mill in Orangeburg County to the electrical substation at Fairview Crossings near Pelion. At the end of a narrow path brushed thick with pine needles, where Pesce said she used to walk her dog to the rear of her property, mammoth steel power poles now tower over a 100-foot-wide clearing cut through the wooded landscape.
"I don't like to come back here anymore," Pesce said. "It's just depressing."
The transmission line slices across only a sliver of Pesce's land and has been up for a while now. Still, Pesce remains steamed at the power company, which says the line and the way it was constructed are nothing unusual.
"Basically, we were crossing a very small portion of the back of their property, and of course, they were not happy with it. So we had to go to litigation, and I know that's been resolved and they've been paid," said Bill Rogers, manager of right-of-way services at Central Electric Cooperative.
"The way we do business is once we select a route, we go out and meet with landowners about location of the line and work with them to try to minimize our impact on their properties as best we can."
The utility has an independent appraisal done on each property and, according to Rogers, buys more than 90 percent of the lands they have to cross.
"Some you can't buy because you have title issues; somebody can't sign an easement or something of that nature. Most of them we do work, but there are some people, they're just going to disagree," Rogers said.
When landowners refuse to sell, the utility takes the land under state eminent domain law, which allows private property to be seized for "public use."
"I think we had a few condemnations, where you have to go through eminent domain to acquire it, but we've addressed all those issues with those people out there," Rogers said. "Most all of those were settled except for a couple — and the line is up."
Pesce says she still has an uncashed check for $750 she received from the utility this spring. The money, she contends, doesn't begin to compensate her family for the dreams lost.
The Pesces say they had visions of building additional houses on the land "and making a small community — either for our own children and our parents or for other people," she said.
Now that the power line crosses her land and runs right along the property line on a neighbor's land, Pesce said, "this whole chunk of land back here, I wouldn't build on it."
"There were things that went on with this that were really not so cool," she added. "We just said, 'Welcome to the South.'"
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