The Tennessee Valley Authority is suing to get immediate access to property in southern Meigs County to begin site preparation work to extend its power lines for a new $300 million system operations center.
But one of the biggest landowners in the area Monday questioned TVA's approach to relocating its power control facility in a rural area without more discussion and negotiations with local property owners and community residents.
"We welcome a new investment by TVA in Meigs County, but it's hard to believe that the relocation of 200 employees to Georgetown and southern Meigs County would be made without any prior discussion about issues related to roads, sewers, security and other infrastructure improvements," said Greg Vital, president of Independent Health Properties and owner of hundreds of acres of farm land in southern Meigs County. "Now TVA is threatening eminent domain to access their site through our property rather than public rights of way or other alternatives like any other developer would do if they had bought and tried to develop a piece of land."
TVA bought 167 acres near Georgetown in the summer of 2017 but until three months ago didn't disclose its plans to move TVA's system operations center and most of its 240 employees from its Chattanooga Office Complex downtown to the remote site near Gunstocker Creek off Highway 58 along Highway 60.
TVA said it wants a more remote location for the nerve center of its power grid, where TVA controls and dispatches power across its seven-state region.
In lawsuits filed last week in federal court in Knoxville, TVA is suing to gain access for properties owned in the area by Vital, John and Bridget Vantiegham and Cornerstone Farm in Meigs County to extend 161,000 kilo-volt transmission lines to the new facility it plans to build and operate by 2023. Vital and others want TVA to use a different transmission path and accuse TVA "of trying to get and use the most convenient and inexpensive route for them." In an interview on Nooga Radio with David Tulis, Vital said TVA is "like a Goliath" running roughshod over landowners in its service territory.
"They should have worked that out long before this and figured out with public discussion what was feasible and acceptable to this community," Vital told Tulis during Monday's on-air interview. "It's hard to imagine in a seven-state region with the hundreds of thousands of acres that TVA already owns that buying another 165 or so acres and trying to gain transmission line access through eminent domain is the best approach for this operations center. The community here is not prepared to handle another 200 jobs and there has been no transparency by TVA with this project."
TVA conducted a public hearing in Georgetown about its plans in August and met with Vital and other landowners shortly thereafter about gaining property access for the high-voltage power lines needed to serve the power control center. For security reasons, TVA Transmission and Power Supply Vice President Aaron Melda said the federal utility would prefer a rural location for the system operations center and the Meigs County site was available and within easy driving distance for workers in the center now located in downtown Chattanooga.
But TVA's plans "destroy the continuity of the property with a bisecting power line across it," Vital said.
Melda said earlier this year the new secured facility is being built to help accommodate a new energy management system that will be supported by another $300 million expansion of the fiber optic lines TVA also is building along about 3,500 miles of TVA's 16,000 miles of transmission lines.
"We think this will be transformative and will provide us a platform for the future to position TVA to provide the most competitive and reliable power," Melda said. "With all of the new solar rooftops and other distributed energy that may be coming, along with smart meters and other new technologies, what will be critical from a central operations standpoint is that we can have visibility, can predict - and in some instances can control - all of those things."
Melda said about 175 of the 240 employees who work in TVA's system operations center likely will move from downtown Chattanooga to the new Georgetown facility when it is fully operational under TVA's "Grid 2023" plan.
TVA spokesman Scott Fiedler said Monday that "TVA is fully transparent" and has conducted a public hearing and held talks with all affected parties.
"TVA is currently seeking a temporary easement with a few property owners, which allows us to survey the proposed transmissions route," he said. "TVA minimizes any land requirements, private property impacts, and environmental impacts associated with transmission projects."
Vital said he was served with a copy of the TVA lawsuit Monday and is still reviewing his options on how to counter the TVA proposal.
Contact Dave Flessner at dflessner@timesfreepress.com or at 423-757-6340.