Grain Belt Express clears another legal hurdle with Missouri appeals court ruling

Chariton County cannot block construction of the Grain Belt Express electric transmission line by refusing permission to cross county roads, the Missouri Western District Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday.

The county can establish rules for how the transmission line crosses its roads, the court ruled as it modified a trial court decision that said the county could make no regulations at all.

“The decision as to whether Grain Belt’s overhead transmission lines for the project would be constructed across Chariton County’s public roads was already made by the (Missouri Public Service Commission) when it issued its Report and Order on Remand granting the (certificate of convenience and necessity) and approving the final proposed route of the project,” Judge Lisa White Hardwick wrote in the unanimous decision of the three-judge panel.

Grain Belt will be constructed by Chicago-based Invenergy and be a 5,000 megawatt line to move wind-derived power from western Kansas to the Indiana border. Half the power it carries will be delivered to Missouri utilities.

At first welcomed by many of the counties it will cross in north Missouri, the line has become controversial with complaints about aesthetics, whether high-voltage lines cause health issues and the power of the Public Service Commission to grant eminent domain power to obtain land for construction.

Republican legislators and agricultural groups tried repeatedly to strip Grain Belt’s right of eminent domain, which would have killed the project. But in 2022, lawmakers passed compromise legislationrequiring, in the event of future large transmission lines, greater compensation for landowners and setting a seven-year time limit for companies to build transmission lines after obtaining their easements. 

Grain Belt’s disagreements with Chariton County began in 2014, Hardwick wrote in the decision, two years after it had initially received consent from the Chariton County Commission to cross its county-owned roads. Chariton County withdrew its consent and made it contingent upon the PSC approving the project.

When it received initial approval from the PSC, Grain Belt’s owners tried to negotiate with Chariton County. When it refused again to give its consent, the lawsuit followed.

Associate Circuit Judge Daren Adkins, assigned to the case from Daviess County, ruled that a state law barring counties from adopting ordinances “governing” utilities within their boundaries meant that an older law, requiring utilities to obtain consent from utilities to go “through, on, under or across” its roads could not be enforced.

The decision Tuesday modified that ruling. The law prohibiting an ordinance governing a utility is designed to protect against local rules that are in conflict with state rules, the court said.

But it doesn’t mean the law requiring consent to cross a road doesn’t have any effect, Hardwick wrote. The county can set standards but it cannot withhold its consent, she wrote.

“A fair interpretation is that (law) requires a county commission’s agreement regarding how a utility’s infrastructure will be constructed across the county’s public roads,” she wrote “not whether such utility’s infrastructure will be constructed across the county’s public roads in the first place.”

Overall utility policy is set at the state level, not the county level, she wrote.

“Doing so usurps the authority granted the MPSC in Chapter 386,” she wrote, “and exercises a power granted to the county in a manner contrary to the public policy of this state.”