RALEIGH — Proponents stepped forward Tuesday to speak on behalf of the workers who have been laid off, the businesses that have had to reduce staff, and the communities that are being forced to cut public services because of delays in building the Atlantic Coast Pipeline.
“For us, the ACP means economic growth and jobs, not only for our employees, but also for their families and friends to be able to get jobs,” Catherine Glover Frazier, Human Resources director and corporate secretary of Glover Construction in Pleasant Hill, said during a press briefing.
“The continued delays have hurt our workers, who are not able to go to work every day or have to be sent farther away to other projects, away from their families and away from their homes while the local pipeline work has halted.”
Her company has been hurt by the barrage of legal challenges that have forced work to be halted on the pipeline, Frazier said. The company has committed resources, equipment, superintendents and management to the project.
“And we’ve committed employees that are operating the equipment and laborers who are on the ground to support this project,” she said. “Stop the delays and let us get back to work, and let the pipeline come to our communities. We want it.”
The 600-mile pipeline would carry natural gas from West Virginia through Virginia and North Carolina, and would end at a point near Pembroke. Its builders, subsidiaries of Dominion Resources, Duke Energy, Piedmont Natural Gas and Southern Company, say about 4,500 people have lost their jobs or cannot be hired because of legal challenges filed in courts in all three states along the pipeline’s route.
A senior attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center office in North Carolina, an ACP foe, has a different take on the jobs issue.
“Atlantic isn’t building this pipeline to create jobs or supply gas anyone needs,” DJ Gerken said. “It is building up so it can stick the bill, plus a hefty profit margin, to electricity customers in North Carolina. This unnecessary pipeline is guaranteed profit for its developers, but it isn’t guaranteed jobs for North Carolinians. Even Atlantic admits it will create only a few dozen permanent jobs.”
The Southern Environmental Law Center points to two news articles as proof that the ACP’s builders’ claims about the number of permanent jobs the pipeline will create, 17,000 by some estimates, is false.
One is a recorded interview by West Virginia students working with PBS NewsHour’s Student Reporting Labs. In the interview, Dominion’s lead engineer for the ACP, Brittany Moody, is said to have disclosed that the number of permanent employees maintaining the pipeline would number in the low 20s.
The second article is from West Virginia Public Radio, which did an investigation of Dominion’s advertising claim that ACP construction would create 17,000 jobs and found it was based on multipliers.
The investigative report states in part, “That’s a lot of jobs and the figure, as it’s cited in the commercial, is greatly exaggerated and misleading …. ‘Cumulative jobs’ is a measure of the number of people projected to have pipeline jobs each year multiplied the number of years the development and construction phase is expected to last. In other words, if someone was hired for a job that lasted for six years, that would count as six cumulative jobs.”
The ACP is backed by the Robeson County’s Board of Commissioners, which on Feb. 1, 2016, passed a resolution of support. The resolution indicated that the county could expect to receive about $5.5 million in property tax revenue from the pipeline over a 10-year period. The construction project was expected to create as many as 260 jobs.
Gregory Poole Equipment Company, a dealer for Caterpillar heavy construction equipment in Raleigh, is one of the local businesses that had started to see the economic boost with construction of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. With the project stalled, that income has dried up.
“If you look around, you see some of the most widely recognized heavy equipment in the world. It has helped build roads, bridges, shopping malls, homes and countless other projects that improve the quality of our lives,” said Rob Jackson, director of sales at Gregory Poole Equipment Company. “But today, it sits idle. Just like the skilled operators who should be using it to build the pipeline. This makes no sense at all.”
Well-financed opposition groups — most of which are not based locally or regionally — are utilizing delay tactics to stop the ACP, he said. Proponents say the delays cause a domino effect that negatively affects communities, workers and economic development without doing anything to provide additional protection of the environment.
In addition, many communities had budgeted for increased revenues from the ACP for schools, roads and other services, Jackson said. Now they wait while the project is delayed.
“It’s time to stop the pointless delays and build the Atlantic Coast Pipeline,” Jackson said. “North Carolina needs it. Our families need it. America needs it. Let’s get to work again. Let’s get working on the line.”
