It was a sea of orange and blue Tuesday when Kinder Morgan held the second of two local open houses on its pipeline plans at Radez elementary in Richmondville:
Orange union supporters making their point in long-sleeved tees and Kinder Morgan reps identifiable by their blue polos.
Add to that the gray-uniformed deputies from the Sheriff's Office and it was hard to find the handful of locals with questions on the proposed natural gas pipeline.
The low turnout was in sharp contrast to the crowd of 100-plus that rallied against Kinder Morgan, Constitution Pipeline, and fracking in a April 7 press conference at the Days Inn, Schoharie, before Kinder Morgan's first open house on the Northeast Energy Direct pipeline project.
The NED would mostly parallel the route of the Constitution Pipeline from Pennsylvania to the Wright Compressor Station to eastern Massachusetts.
FERC has already approved the 124-mile Constitution Pipeline-though that project is still waiting for needed permits from DEC.
Kinder Morgan is expected to file an application with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission this fall.
If NED wins eventual approval, Harold Loder of Richmondville will have two pipelines running through his Beards Hollow farm.
And that doesn't worry him at all.
Mr. Loder lost 80 acres of his family farm to the building of I-88 in the late 1970s after an attorney advised him he could fight it-or just realize there was no point.
The family kept on milking cows until a few years ago when they switched to black Angus beef cattle and Mr. Loder said he doesn't expect that operation to be impacted by the pipeline plans at all.
"It'll be a little disruptive when they're putting it in, but you can farm over it, so I don't really see an issue," he said. "We won't really know it's there."
Constitution tweaked the pipeline route through the family farm several times, Mr. Loder said, in part to avoid the two biggest red oaks in Schoharie County as recognized by SUNY Cobleskill.
Assemblyman Pete Lopez, however, is on the other side of the NED and has called on Kinder Morgan to abandon its plans for it.
"At best, the company's 'monkey see, monkey do' approach demonstrates tremendous insensitivity to those communities already divided over...Constitution," Assemblyman Lopez said in a written statement.
"At worst, it suggests Kinder Morgan feels it can do as it wants and simply roll over our small rural communities."
Assemblyman Lopez also said that unlike the Constitution Pipeline, which would allow municipalities and public utilities to tap the line and develop natural gas distribution systems, NED would offer no visible benefits.