State suddenly awakened to consider compensation of damage

Photo: Toomas Huik

Rail Baltic is to pass through fields, woods, lands and houses. How to compensate for these, the state so far has failed to consider. Now it scrambles to find solutions – prolonging the planning procedure and inflating costs of project.

«For the sake of my cows, would anybody erect a €5m ecoduct?» asks Märt Riisenberg, owner of private limited company Kehtna Mõis.

Of course not. Still, the problem pointed out by Mr Riisenberg is of the serious kind: how will the planned railway impact Estonian farmers? What will happen when a cowshed will be standing to the one side of the tracks, and the pastures to the other? Silage storage here, cow farm there? As railway cuts a field in two, how will the tractor get to the piece way over Rail Baltic?

With all this, the company of Mr Riisenberg is now faced. Kehtna Mõis owns over 50 plots of land, about 1,700 hectares all in all. One version of Rail Baltic would basically cut his lands into two halves. According Mr Riisenberg’s math, this would mean 16,000 – 17,000 kilometres (about 10,000 miles) extra travel a year, for his machines. That’ll cost a lot: the fuel, the spare parts, the working hours, wear and tear of machines.

The trouble is definitely not limited to Kehtna Commune and private limited company Kehtna Mõis. Problems basically the same will emerge all along the course of the project. For example: Tarmo Lehiste, perhaps more widely known as a football figure, sits as chairman of Vändra Commune council, Pärnu County, and owns a large local agricultural company OÜ Kaisma. Mr Lehiste raises the same subject.

Tenant blowing in the wind

Kaisma OÜ uses over 1,200 hectares of land. Mr Lehiste would now ask: «Should the railway cut cow house from pastures, shall we lift the house to the other side?»

Another weighty aspect underlined by Mr Lehiste: not always do farmers own the land, some are tenants. Both Kaisma and Kehtna Mõis have it both ways: half the land is theirs, half is rented.

«Should the railway pass rented land, it’s easy for the ministry to say that’s not the farmer’s problem, as the land is not his,» says Mr Lehiste – even though the railway will destroy the company as an entity.

What will those do whose fields will be split and cow houses separated from pasturelands? How will rental land splitting be compensated? How will people get to their jobs as the usual road is cut off? If the field isn’t really cut in two and just a sliver is separated – how does one count the loss (modern technology is meant for large fields, not for tiny patches)? The answer is blowing in the wind.

«To develop the companies, bank loans have been taken for years, sometimes for decades – meaning that, when compensating for income lost and damage done, the long years need to be considered,» thinks Mr Riisenberg.

Increasingly, foresters are raising their voices; due to the specifics of their trade, possible damage is far reaching. Simply put, the forest business looks like this: the first 20–30 years you invest, into land improvement, planting, thinning, maintenance. The next 20–30 years you do nothing; you just wait for the forest to grow. Only in the decades following can you cut the forest and get the money.

What, then, will happen if, for the sake of the railway, a two dozen years old forest is cut down? In a forest of that age, there do not seem to be any trees at all – so, basically, it might be claimed there’s nothing much to compensate, as the trees are small and there’s no timber. Such logic is foolishness to foresters, as, while the woods look worthless, the investments have been made, but profits would only come in a distant future. 

Today, all these problems remain theoretical. The course not yet being chosen, nobody knows which fields or forests Rail Baltic will end up splitting. Even so: whatever the version selected, it will, in one way or another, have an effect on lots of people and companies.

Somebody will suffer

At a public Rail Baltic discussion at Riigikogu, yesterday, environment minister Keit Pentus-Rosimannus admitted that, as railway will not be built in the air, some damage is guaranteed. The endeavour being the more complex as never before has anything in the magnitude of Rail Baltic been done, in Estonia. There’s no clarity, no rules of compensation, no experience. Several issues have come as a surprise to the very planners. Now, they are scrambling to work out some kind of methodology and ruleset.

As admitted by Rail Baltic project manager Indrek Sirp, compensation was raised most sharply by farmers and foresters.

«Next week, we will have a working meeting with the University of Life Sciences folks, where we will be discussing if and how the university might work out a methodology to assess damage to farm- and forest lands by Rail Baltic,» adds Mr Sirp.

Compensation is also covered by a current law, having been used to compensate damage caused by road construction. Even so, Rail Baltic is such a vast and novel endeavour that a host of new issues are being raised. Both economy and justice ministries admit that the current law may not be sufficient to cover the Rail Baltic issue, the situation needing to be dealt with.

Farmers and foresters, to say nothing about communes and village societies, are directly and via representative organisations actively involved in Rail Baltic discussions. No longer can the questions posed by them be ignored. On the other hand, the answers have been delayed, the questions keep taking officials by surprise, the latter now in quite a hurry to come up with solutions. Planning Rail Baltic – a piece of cake as it seemed, a few months ago – is proving much more complex than expected.

On Tuesday, it was announced that the creation of Rail Baltic joint enterprise by the three Baltic States has been postponed.