The first meeting of a Dominion-formed community advisory group focused on the planned 41,000 horsepower compressor station in Buckingham is set for Wednesday at 11:30 a.m.
The meeting will be held at the Buckingham County Administration Complex, according to Dominion spokesman Jim Norvelle.
“This will be a working group meeting for representatives that have been invited to participate on behalf of their organizations. Members of the public may attend and observe. They will also be able to read the details online at their convenience following the meeting,” he said.
According to Dominion External Affairs Manager Carla Picard, who’s working with the proposed Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP), the mission of the group is twofold: to provide additional information in working sessions with community representatives and to gather input and feedback from the members “on the preferences and priorities of the people in the community to ultimately affect our plans for the station.”
The group will be focused on the station rather than the entire pipeline project and was instituted in response to concerns surrounding the compressor station. A third-party facilitator, the Natural Resource Group, will facilitate the meetings, Picard said.
Weeks ago, ACP, LLC purchased about 68.5 acres in Buckingham to build the proposed gas-fired compressor station for the proposed interstate natural gas transmission pipeline. The tract of land is located just northwest of the Union Hill community along Route 56 just southeast of Shelton Store Road. The planned pipeline would cross and connect to an existing Transco interstate natural gas pipeline on the parcel of land, according to Dominion.
Both Satchidananda Ashram — Yogaville and Friends of Buckingham (FOB), which are both opposed to the proposed 550-mile natural gas pipeline, will attend the meeting, representatives said.
The 42-inch pipeline, if approved, would travel through Buckingham County near the Yogaville community.
“We will continue to express our dedication to preserve Buckingham’s historic, rural character and to oppose the industrial … compressor station and 42-inch high-pressure Atlantic Coast Pipeline,” FOB said in a statement.
The group said while Dominion welcomed input at the meeting, “the public is welcome to attend to gain insight into this, so far one-sided PR campaign by the industry.”
The group asked that a public forum that The Herald proposed in an editorial “be facilitated by an independent and neutral entity, and be held immediately. Both sides of the issue would be addressed in a fair and balanced exchange,” the group said.
FOB said it considers the “seizures of private land through eminent domain to be a loss of our constitutional rights to use and enjoy our land for our own economic benefit, health and happiness; the ACP and compressor station, instead, expose county residents and private property owners to hazardous, traumatizing living conditions and alienation from our property against our will.”
Ernie Moore, the executive director of Satchidananda Ashram — Yogaville, Inc. said the community appreciated the invitation to the group meeting “to make public our concerns about the Atlantic Coast Pipeline project and the proposed compressor station.”
“While Yogaville will attend this forum, we continue to have serious concerns about the health, safety and environmental impacts of both the proposed pipeline and its compressor station,” Moore said.
He said the spiritual community’s participation in the meetings was not an endorsement of the proposed project. “We continue to be completely opposed to the pipeline and its companion compressor station in Buckingham,” he said.