New Petition Against The Jamaica Bay Gas Pipeline Targets President Obama

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The proposed placement of new natural gas pipelines from Williams and National Grid. Source: Williams

Opponents of the proposed Jamaica Bay gas pipeline have crafted another petition to showcase their disdain for the plans, following the U.S. Senate’s approval of the pipeline proposal.

Barbara Pearson, a Floyd Bennett Field Gardens Association member, helped write the petition, which she hopes will convince President Barack Obama to veto H.R. 2606, the legislation that will authorize industrial use of Floyd Bennett Field and appropriate part of the park to Williams Companies and National Grid.

Pearson writes:

Please sign my petition asking President Obama to veto HR 2606 – you will be asked to create an account on whitehouse.gov in order to sign this petition but it is extremely easy and they will email you a link that takes you right back to the petition once your account has been created. We need 150 signatures for the petition to be viewable on whitehouse.gov. If we get 25,000 signatures, the Obama administration says it will respond to the petition, so please forward this link far and wide.

Pearson joins a long list of advocates who oppose the pipeline, such as the Coalition Against the Rockaway Pipeline (CARP). According to CARP, if the pipeline is allowed to course through part of the Rockaways and potentially create environmental hazards, it would create a precedent by which future pipeline projects would be able to operate in other federally-funded parklands for similar projects.

An excerpt from the petition states:

In addition, we feel the risk this legislation poses to ALL national parks being given over to inappropriate uses cannot be overstated when one considers that NPS is increasingly motivated to solve its maintenance backlog by entering into private “partnerships” as a source of financing. In fact, the “rehabilitation” of the hangars at Floyd Bennett Field at no cost to NPS is openly cited as a reason this inappropriate use will be implemented if H.R. 2606 becomes law.

Let your view be known – to pipeline or not to pipeline?