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Stop eminent domain

Letter to the Editor, Farmers, Ranchers, Landowners, and anyone interested in the consequences of government officials making decisions that harm others,

Eminent domain is the process used to take your private property to be used for what the government determines to be more beneficial. It is what the Iowa Utilities Board has proposed through a rule change, Docket NO. RMU-2020-0028, to make the process of building more industrial wind sites and the transmission necessary to transmit it to Eastern states. The Iowa Utilities Board is made up of three appointed, unelected, people making decisions for everybody. Their plan is affecting everyone who owns property in the state.

The intended outcome is to force Iowa to act in a way designed to promote the “common good”, to benefit the most people (allegedly), and prioritize one group of people over individuals. In the case of Iowa, farmers and landowners have been used to meet “green” energy goals.

If you choose to make “green energy” plans for yourself, your family, your farmland AND it doesn’t have an impact on your neighbors, you are welcome, in the United States of America, to be free to design your life as you wish. However, a few people in government positions should not be permitted to have the tyrannical power to force decisions on you, to use or take your land, for purposes that they deem important.

The three members of the Iowa Utilities Board are not omniscient, they do not know everything. They cannot plan what millions of people should do or what sources of electricity they should utilize, where wind energy projects should be placed in the 99 counties of Iowa, or how to care for the best farmland in the world and the agricultural businesses ancillary to it.

If you want to protect private property rights, if you do not want to live in an industrial wind project, if you want your family and neighbors protected from the decisions of a three member board appointed by the governor, then voice your concerns! Talk to your family, friends, and neighbors. Contact your legislators and the governor.

Iowa, it is time to stop the madness of industrial wind turbines running over our state. It does not matter if you don’t sign an easement for your own property, the IUB proposes that the wind energy developers take your land.

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