Governor Gianforte Recounts his Visit to Keystone Pipeline Area

Over the weekend, Montana Governor Greg Gianforte toured the areas in eastern Montana where the Keystone XL Pipeline would have crossed the state and spoke to business owners, workers and county officials about the cancellation of the pipeline.

“There's no good reason that 30 miles of pipe is sitting in a yard north of Saco unused and there's no good reason that all of these workers on this one section of pipe I visited, over 1,000 workers lost their jobs,” said Gianforte. “President Biden's decision to shut this down was purely political and it came at the expense of hard working Montanans.”

Gianforte related his visits with others in eastern Montana about the cancellation of the project.

“When I was up in Glasgow and Saco and Malta, I spoke with school superintendents who are worried about being able to hire teachers,” he said. “There are local businesses that invested literally millions of their own dollars expanding their business in anticipation of this project. County commissioners, who would have seen their county revenues there in Philips County, go up by about 50% if this project had gone forward, and with a stroke of a pen, President Biden shut it down.”

Gianforte said millions of private dollars were invested in the area to provide infrastructure for the pipeline.

“I was there with Barnard construction,” he said. “They're constructing the first 90 miles of the pipeline. They shared with us, you can’t give a specific figure, but for their business alone, it was hundreds of millions of dollars. I spoke with the county commissioners, and the local electric co-op. This project would have quadrupled the amount of electric power they had to provide and would have allowed them to rebuild the grid across three counties in northeastern Montana.”

In addition Gianforte joined with several other western governors to ask President Biden to reauthorize exploration for oil and gas on government lands.

“ I joined together with Governor Burgum in North Dakota, Mark Gordon in Wyoming, Brad Little in Idaho, along with about 15 other governors, and we sent a letter to President Biden saying, ‘listen, stop pandering to these environmental extremists and let's move forward with responsible resource development on federal lands’.”

Governor Gianforte’s monthly visit on KGVO’s Talk Back show in March will be open for phone calls from listeners.