Iowa Utilities Board Chair Geri Huser “will help decide whether to build a major oil pipeline even though her family law firm has represented a landowner trying to block it,” Ryan Foley reported yesterday for the Associated Press. Shortly after Governor Terry Branstad named Huser to the utilities board in March, Foley reported that Huser’s brother R. Bradley Skinner “has represented farmers who oppose the $3.8 billion [Bakken] pipeline that would transport crude oil from North Dakota across Iowa.” Skinner is no longer the landowners’ legal counsel, and Huser has said she wasn’t aware of her brother’s involvement in the Bakken pipeline dispute.

The latest AP story notes that Huser’s decision not to recuse herself

means all three [Iowa Utilities] board members will vote on whether to approve the $3.8 billion underground pipeline, avoiding a possible deadlock. But legal experts say parties may request Huser’s recusal due to the appearance of bias, and if she declines, the issue could be raised during any appeals of the board’s decision.

I have a bad feeling that any appeals of the board’s decision will come from pipeline opponents rather than from Dakota Access, LLC, the subsidiary of Energy Transfer Partners that wants to build the Bakken pipeline through eighteen counties from northwest to southeast Iowa.