Residents sue over Driftless region transmission line

A group of western Wisconsin residents are suing the companies planning to construct the state’s highest voltage transmission line across the Driftless region.

The lawsuit, filed May 11 in Vernon County Circuit Court, alleges that the transmission line would be a nuisance that would cause “significant harm” to private property owners and asks a judge to stop the project.

La Crosse-based Dairyland Power Cooperative and the transmission utility company GridLiance are behind the proposed 765-kilovolt line, dubbed the MariBell Transmission Project, which would be part of a longer line running from Minnesota to Wisconsin across the Mississippi River.

The companies argue the project is needed to improve the reliability of the Midwest’s electrical grid. But local landowners have pushed back, saying the line and the tall steel towers that will hold it don’t belong in the Driftless area.

“These structures indisputably are a nuisance,” said Erik Olsen, an attorney with the Madison-based law firm Eminent Domain Services LLC who is representing the landowner group. “We’re going to shut this all down.”

Representatives from Dairyland and GridLiance Heartland said they do not comment on litigation but “remain committed to working with all stakeholders.”

The MariBell project was set in motion in 2024, when Midcontinent Independent System Operator – the power grid operator for the central United States – approved a suite of projects to build a transmission superhighway across the upper Midwest. Since the project began attracting local attention last fall, several local governments in western Wisconsin have passed resolutions requesting more information about it.

Tim Woodhouse, who farms near the village of Genoa in Vernon County, leads the Coalition Against Maribel 765 Inc., the group of potentially impacted landowners that filed the lawsuit. Woodhouse has been vocal about his opposition to the transmission line since a land surveyor stopped at his property last year and explained its size and scope.

“We feel pretty strongly that we need to get ahead of this,” he said. “[People] want to feel like they have a little control over this.”

The 12-page complaint argues that the transmission line would create a “private nuisance” – a common law concept that is one of the oldest ways to address environmental harms through a legal framework, said Sarah Fox, an associate professor at Marquette University Law School focused on environmental law, property and land use.

The plaintiffs will need to both show that a nuisance exists and show that the conduct of the defendants is unreasonable, Fox said.

“There are so many examples of ways that energy siting … is imposing localized impacts while allegedly having these broader social goods,” she said. “The question about what counts as reasonable is really interesting.”

The complaint also claims there would be “no need whatsoever” for the project if not for the proliferation of data centers in Wisconsin and around the Great Lakes. A spokesperson for the regional grid operator told the Journal Sentinel that the suite of transmission line projects, including MariBell, used forecasts from prior to the explosion of data center proposals to determine it was necessary. But residents are still skeptical given the massive power needs of large data centers being planned for the region.

Fox said she expects attorneys to focus on that piece of the puzzle as the lawsuit moves forward.

Dairyland and GridLiance plan to file an application with the Wisconsin Public Service Commission for the project this fall. They’ll also need to present it to Minnesota’s Public Utilities Commission and seek state and federal environmental permits. If it passes regulatory review, it could be in service by 2034.

If the Public Service Commission approves the project, Fox said it could be challenging to convince a judge that it is unreasonable. Still, there are other reasons to pursue the lawsuit, she said, including encouraging regulatory bodies to take landowners’ problems with the project more seriously.

Olsen said even if the court won’t prohibit the project from moving forward, he hopes for a declaration that it constitutes a nuisance so his clients can bring that to the Public Service Commission.

His firm intervened in a previous challenge to a transmission line project in the Driftless region, the 345-kilovolt Badger-Coulee transmission line between Madison and La Crosse that came online in 2018.

There is also an ongoing legal battle over another transmission line in the area, the 345-kilovolt Cardinal-Hickory Creek line, which came online last September. The electricity in that line made the area attractive for a potential billion-dollar data center, Wisconsin Watch has reported, though local opposition has appeared to curb that possibility for now.