Folks who were granted a detailed route hearing for the Trans Mountain expansion project should be notified by Kinder Morgan by next week.
After reading the Oct. 6 issue of the NOW, David Huntley learned, to his surprise, he was one of the successful applicants chosen by the National Energy Board to participate in the pipeline hearings.
To qualify for a hearing, statements needed to show a direct link between the route and the applicant’s lands and how those lands could be “adversely affected” by the pipeline expansion.
The NEB received 452 statements of opposition to the proposed route, with 135 related to the Burnaby segment. Of those 135, 28 were granted a detailed route hearing.
“The National Energy Board has done it again. It has made a decision on an application that I made for a hearing about the pipeline route but has not bothered to tell me,” Huntley wrote in an email.
“Readers may recall the same thing happened before when hundreds of people applied to be interveners or commenters at the original NEB hearing on the Kinder Morgan pipeline application.
“There were many people months later who did not know whether or not their application had been accepted because the NEB had not told them. Once again, the NEB is not acting as the public servant that it should be.”
NEB spokesperson James Stevenson said it’s Kinder Morgan’s job, not the national energy regulator’s, to notify successful applicants. The NEB has given Kinder Morgan until Oct. 17 to do so.
He said when the NOW published its story, the news about the detailed route hearings had just broken.
“Those (names) just came out before the company could get ahold of them,” he said.
