UPDATED: Landowner Sells Land Used for #NoDAPL Protests to Pipeline Company: “I Just Wanted Out”
TOM STROMME/Tribune Aerial photograph taken Saturday, August 20, 2016 over protest camp on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota. Camp shown is called the Seven Councils Camp or the Overflow Camp. There is another much smaller camp that has been occupied since April and called the Camp of Sacred Stones. The people who are in the camps are protesting construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. A spokesperson for the protesters, community organizer Joye Braun, said there are more than 2000 people living in the two camps.
The #NoDAPL protesters working to block the Dakota Access Pipeline haven’t camped on the land of the historic Cannonball Ranch (see this link for backstory on this property), but at least some of the protest activities have taken place there.
Apparently land owner David Meyer is fed up with it.
“It’s a beautiful ranch, but I just wanted out,” he told the folks at KXNews.
Meyer is a local, private citizen. I can’t imagine how difficult his situation has been with these on-going protests. Last month the Bismarck Tribune reported “damage to an ATV, stolen tools and windows busted out of equipment” at a quonset on Meyer’s land, though the paper said there is no “hard evidence” linking the damage to protesters.
Hard to imagine that’s a coincidence, though.
Energy Transfer Partners, the group trying to build the pipeline, is presumably less vulnerable to backlash from the sometimes violent protesters dozens of whom have been arrested and charged with crimes related to trespass and vandalism.
I emailed ETP spokeswoman Vicki Granado this morning. “I can confirm that we purchased land, however nothing beyond that,” she told me.
This is a truly sad commentary on the behavior and antics of the #NoDAPL protesters.
UPDATE: From the comments:
DAPL doesn’t want land… I have a feeling this a very temporary sale, with the original owner having buy-back rights after it dies down. This will also give DAPL a little more leverage to keep people off the land.
That seems plausible.
UPDATE: The above scenario seems all the more plausible now that I’ve gotten a look at the deed. Apparently the land was sold for $100.
Previously the ranch had been listed on a realty website for $5 million.
I redacted the address of the Meyers.
UPDATE: Apparently when a deed says property was sold for the consideration of $100 it doesn’t actually mean it was sold for $100. They can just put that figure in there to hide the actual purchase price.
So the land was sold for some undisclosed price that was almost certainly higher than $100 given the clear value of the land.
