A federal judge says her courtroom is not the place to determine whether the taking of private property for the Mountain Valley Pipeline amounts to what a lawsuit called a “government-sanctioned land grab.”
U.S. District Court Judge Elizabeth Dillon dismissed part of a lawsuit filed by landowners in the pipeline’s path.
The landowners had claimed that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s approval of the project was an unconstitutional overreach that gave Mountain Valley authority to use land it does not own through the controversial process of eminent domain.
That challenge was made “in the wrong court at the wrong time,” Dillon wrote in an opinion issued Monday.
