Ranchers

The Mid-States Coalition for Progress is a grassroots organization of landowners in South Dakota and Wyoming who are opposed to DM&E's proposed expansion.

Ranch families maintain that western South Dakota needs a granger railroad, but that it doesn’t need a coal conveyor belt.  They support the Canadian Pacific’s acquisition of DM&E and an upgrade of DM&E’s existing main line across South Dakota and Minnesota.

Ranchers in Wyoming and South Dakota have multiple reasons for opposing DM&E’s Powder River Basin (PRB) coal-hauling project:

1. Land grabbing. DM&E wants to lay 280 miles of track from Wall, S.D., to the coal mines in Wyoming, and it is seeking eminent domain authority to take land from more than 130 owners who don’t want to sell part of a homestead that in many cases has been in the family for more than a century. Most of the landowners live and work on a ranch, and they don’t want a coal corridor with 43 coal unit trains a day rumbling across property that is both their business and their home.

2. Ongoing disruption. Having a rail line slice across their property will lower property values, prevent the sale and purchase of property, dislocate grazing patterns, make pastures inaccessible, complicate the movement of livestock, separate cattle from life-giving water and shelter during storms, disrupt water pipelines, invade center-pivot irrigated areas, curtail hunting opportunities, and add vehicular traffic associated with fighting fires and cleaning up after derailments and other accidents.

3. Stewardship. Most ranchers in the Deep Plains consider themselves stewards of the land.  They have been entrusted with a precious gift, and they are on a mission to pass that gift on to future generations in even better shape than it was given to them. DM&E’s coal project makes that mission impossible. Environmental damages caused by the project would facilitate the spread of noxious weeds, increase the incidence of prairie fires, pollute the ground with coal dust, pollute the air with diesel emissions, cause landslides in the quirky Pierre shale, obliterate wetlands, erode stream beds, threaten surface water quality, endanger ground water quality, stress and kill wildlife (especially sage grouse), ruin pristine views and disrupt solitude.

4. A bad business idea. Ranchers wonder why they should lose their land for a massive project with questionable value. Even the federal Surface Transportation Board (STB), in its Dec. 30, 2005, Final Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement, concluded the PRB project would produce minimal benefits: “The changes in transportation rates that would result from this project are relatively small. … There is every reason to believe that regardless of whether DM&E were to enter the PRB transportation market as a third competitor, the expected year-by-year increase in demand for PRB coal could be met by the existing carriers on their existing routes.” 

5. DM&E’s lack of integrity. The ranchers don’t want to do business with a dishonorable organization. Through its action, they say, DM&E has repeatedly demonstrated lack of honesty, fairness and respect.

“From the beginning, this project has made so little sense that I have always wondered what’s really behind it.”
– Nancy Darnell, Rancher
Newcastle, Wyo.

“There is a no ‘reasonable compensation’ for tearing apart a hundred-year-old ranch.”
– Paul Jensen, Rancher
Wasta, S.D.

“I have always been outraged that a private company can take my property just because it says it can employ more people and pay more taxes.  I think most South Dakotan believe this is fundamentally wrong. The coal project is not about public need but private greed.”
– Paulene Staben, Rancher
Oral, Wyo. 

Contacts
Donley and Nancy Darnell
1331 Morrisey Road
Newcastle,  WY  82701
Home Phone: 307-746-4044
Cell Pone: 307-941-1080
E-mail: D_ndarnell@Hughes.net