MORGANTOWN – The state Public Service Commission has changed the locations of two of the public hearings set in the NextEra Energy Transmission MidAtlantic’s MidAtlantic Resiliency Link Project case – including the Morgantown hearing.
The PSC has also ordered NextEra to publish a corrected public notice about the hearings, in response to a Morgantown resident pointing out a problem in the original published notice.
And PSC staff has filed some recommendations for the PSC to consider regarding people and groups that want to intervene in the case.
Here are newly ordered hearing dates and locations:
All four hearings are in June:
- Potomac State College Church-McKee Arts Center, Keyser, 5:30 p.m., June 4;
- Hampshire County Courthouse, Romney, 5:30 p.m. June 5;
- Monongalia County Center, 270 Mylan Park Lane, Morgantown, 5:30 p.m. June 10;
- Kingwood Civic Center, Kingwood, 5:30 p.m. June 11.
On the matter of the correction, Morgantown resident Beth Ann Bossio notified the PSC earlier this month that the links NextEra put in its hearing notice to submit comments and to visit the NextEra website were both nonfunctional.
The PSC agreed in its somewhat wordy way in its Wednesday order:
“The record demonstrates that the previously published notice of filing contained an incorrect website address for submitting public comments, which could impair the ability of interested persons to participate in this proceeding. Additionally, inaccuracies in the location descriptions for certain public comment hearings create a risk that members of the public may be unable to attend or provide comment at the designated times and places.”
So the PSC ordered NextEra to publish a “Notice of Public Comment Hearings and Correction of Notice of Filing” as spelled out in the order. The new notice will run as legal ads in newspapers of general circulation in Monongalia, Preston, Mineral, and Hampshire Counties between May 1 and May 14.
On intervention: Interested parties petition the PSC to intervene in cases so that they can submit testimony on the record; the PSC grants intervenor status to parties that have a demonstrated legal interest.
The PSC staff memorandum, also filed Wednesday, notes that NextEra has filed four responses the many petitions that have come in – and are still coming in as the period to file petitions runs through June 1.
As of Wednesday, there were 63 petitions to intervene filed by various individual landowners, interested parties, businesses, and county commissions located near the proposed route, staff said. THE PSC had signaled in an April 9 order that all intervenors should coordinate efforts with similarly situated intervenors to avoid duplicative pleadings and testimony.
Of note, NextEra “has uniformly objected to any individual landowner outside of the MARL Project corridor.” The company also wants petitioners to be grouped together by county, and property co-owners to be joined in a single petition.
In response, staff said “it is too early in the proceedings to group intervenors together in county groups, particularly as the intervention deadline has not yet passed.” County groupings should be formed after the June 1 deadline, when the PSC has a full head count, in order to achieve judicial efficiency in evidentiary hearings. “Duplicative cross-examination would be contrary to the need for judicial economy.”
Staff disagreed with NextEra’s objection to deny intervention to individual landowners outside the route corridor. “Staff objects to such an arbitrary limitation on intervenors.” Per PSC precedent, staff recommends granting intervenor status to any petitioner within a 10-mile area of the proposed route – five miles on each side of the line.
Finally, “Staff notes that where petitions are more general in nature, the interests of these parties may be represented adequately by a group or organization. The commission should consider requiring any such petitioners to amend their petitions to intervene to clarify how they are uniquely affected by the proposed route and why their interests cannot be adequately represented by a group or a county commission.”
The staff recommendations now await a PSC order.
MARL’s proposed 500 kilovolt line would span 107.5 miles starting in Greene County, Pa., and ending at a handoff point – a new 500 kV transmission line to be constructed by FirstEnergy – in Frederick County, Va.
About 58.9 miles of the line would cross West Virginia: 5.9 miles across Monongalia County, 15.8 across Preston, 10.9 across Mineral and 26.2 across Hampshire.
The current cost estimate for MARL is $1.167 billion. Of this, the current cost estimate for the West Virginia Portions is $482,706,000. These estimates include siting, engineering, construction, financing, administration, and legal costs.
