This is the first video in our series from the Property Rights and Pipeline Lobby Day that was held last year. In this video, you’ll hear from Darcy and Kevin Stoddard.
Kevin and Darcy are farmers and hunters who live in a log cabin, just 30 feet from the pipeline. If Line 66 comes through, they will likely lose their home. When Enbridge came through in 2007, the company insisted on clearing 100 ft. of “temporary work space.” Reasoning that they had never seen a 100 ft.-wide bulldozer, the couple asked if they could reduce it to just 50 ft. But, as the Enbridge land agent told them, “This is not a negotiation.” Darcy sums it up this way:
“They just decide what they’re gonna take, and then they just take it.”
Enbridge cut down all of the couple’s 200-year-old oak trees, buried them (denying the Stoddards any use of the wood), and planted grass in its place. “That’s not what I call temporary,” Kevin says. The hunting grounds that they wanted to provide for their children and grandchildren now look like “an airport runway”- not too attractive to deer!
As Darcy says of eminent domain for private gain:
We don’t think it’s fair. It’s not American. It’s a Canadian company coming to take our land, for their benefit, with the possibility, the probability, that there’s going to be some kind of damage to our beautiful Wisconsin.
Protecting our homes and water 