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Residents Square Off For Pipe Fight

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By MARK HOLAN, The Tampa Tribune

Published: November 14, 2007

MACFARLANE PARK - Residents are organizing against a proposed jet fuel pipeline through their neighborhoods with encouragement from a former city councilman who represents a competing pipeline company.

"This is a project that isn't needed being forced through a neighborhood where it isn't wanted," Bob Buckhorn told the Northeast Macfarlane Neighborhood Crime Watch Association last week.

A consortium of airlines at Tampa International Airport has hired Houston-based Kinder Morgan to build an underground fuel pipeline to the airport from the Port of Tampa, near downtown.

The airlines say the pipeline would help lower fuel costs, potentially lowering fares.

Buckhorn, a public affairs consultant, represents Tampa Pipeline Corp., which has supplied jet fuel to TIA since 1971 through an underground pipeline from Port Tampa, near MacDill Air Force Base.

In an Oct. 17 letter to the city council, Tampa Pipeline said the airport doesn't have enough storage capacity to make two pipelines economically viable, which means one would go out of business.

The 40 or so people at Thursday's meeting voted unanimously to flood Mayor Pam Iorio and the council with phone calls, letters and e-mail opposing another pipeline.

"In my opinion a second pipeline is unnecessary," association President Marge Hart said. "It would disrupt neighborhoods all over the city."

Kinder Morgan is negotiating a franchise agreement that would pay the city for the use of right of way. The agreement requires council approval but isn't scheduled for a vote.

Kinder Morgan says it is exploring alternate routes. In October, the company presented neighborhood leaders and the council with a proposed route that cuts through parts of the Ybor City and West Tampa historical districts, Tampa Heights and Macfarlane Park.

At the time, Kinder Morgan project manager Jacque Williams said the company was exploring deep-drilling methods to make installing the 9-mile pipeline less disruptive than excavating residential streets.

In an e-mail to TIA officials six weeks earlier, a Southwest Airlines executive wrote that Williams told him 90 percent of the pipeline would be installed by digging trenches.

Jim Stevenson, who heads the airlines consortium, quoted Williams as saying 1 or 2 miles of the work would involve open trenches on residential streets.

"Apparently the cost of directional boring has increased significantly," he wrote.

Kinder Morgan spokeswoman Emily Thompson said last week that the company is testing to see how it can minimize street construction.

"Early indications from these studies show that Kinder Morgan may be able to use such drilling on a substantial amount of its route within city streets," she wrote in an e-mail to The Tampa Tribune.

Other e-mails obtained by the Tribune through a public-records request show that the airlines consortium, which was criticized for not having a representative at the council hearing or neighborhood meetings in October, might get more involved in promoting the project.

"The public unrest is becoming apparent, and it looks like the airlines should consider being part of the presentation in lieu of just Kinder Morgan being in the spotlight," TIA operations manager Ted Leslie told Stevenson in an Oct. 5 e-mail.

Stevenson replied Oct. 8 that he was "rather upset with Kinder Morgan" for failing to tell him the project was being discussed by the council.

"I am not, however, surprised that there is opposition, but am surprised at Kinder Morgan's anemic PR efforts to date," he wrote.

Reporter Mark Holan can be reached at (813) 835-2102 or mholan@tampatrib.com.

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