Blog By: Jacob Krummen
The Commonwealth of Kentucky and utility organizations in the state must undertake new projects to maintain and develop our infrastructure to meet the State’s current and future needs. Public utilities are vital to our daily lives—bringing power from where it is generated to homes and businesses, allowing us to power our appliances and phones, ensuring we can heat or cool our spaces to remain comfortable, and allowing us to keep the lights on when we need them.[i] Eminent domain is the right of the government to appropriate property for a public use, which must be accompanied by just compensation.[ii] The use of eminent domain to carry out public projects is necessary. In recognizing such necessity, the General Assembly has empowered various private organizations to use eminent domain to achieve such projects.[iii] Kentucky and its citizens have also expressed a desire to protect certain lands through the use of conservation easements.[iv] In such a situation, a tension between development and conservation is readily apparent. In Kentucky, legislation has been introduced, but not passed into law, that attempts to address that tension.
During the 2025 Regular Session legislators introduced several bills that would change Kentucky’s eminent domain laws. House Bill 630 (“HB 630”) is one such bill. HB 630 seeks, among other changes not discussed here, to prohibit eminent domain on certain types of land and to create new requirements which are meant to bring about more transparency to the eminent domain process.[v]
HB 630 would prohibit the taking of land subject to a conservation easement, within the boundaries of an agricultural district, or subject to an agricultural conservation easement through the use of eminent domain.[vi] To be clear, these prohibitions would mostly impact the new construction of long, high-voltage transmission lines or larger-scale water district projects, not ordinary extensions of existing systems.[vii] Currently, there are 581 certified agricultural districts consisting of approximately 445,170 acres in 80 of Kentucky’s 120 counties.[viii] Although no comprehensive figure has been established, conservation easements in Kentucky likely encompass hundreds of thousands of acres.[ix] Indeed, conservation of land, especially farm land, in Kentucky, is a laudable objective. However, under the proposed legislation, these lands would become vast swaths of blockades for the development of any new utility infrastructure projects. such barriers could cause major impediments to maintaining energy resiliency in the state and meeting future utility demands.[x] Even if infrastructure development would still be possible, HB 630’s prohibitions would cause the process to be significantly more arduous, time-consuming, and costly. Ultimately, if public projects were required to zig-zag across the state in order to avoid such lands, every day Kentuckians would bear the resulting financial burdens.[xi]
HB 630 would create a new requirement for the verified petitions that are filed with the Circuit Court in the applicable county.[xii] The new requirement would include a statement certifying that the project cannot be reasonably placed in an alternate location or routed in a manner that would be less disruptive to layout or operations of current and potential uses of the property.[xiii] A statement like that might reassure the landowner that the project necessarily implicates their property. At first blush, this seems fair, but in practice such a requirement could cause a mess.
Take, for example, a project that must continue through a corridor that encompasses two properties side-by-side. The project might reasonably be able to go through either one. Thus, each property would serve as reasonable alternate location to the other. Taking this requirement at face value could impede progression on public projects, not because there is no reasonable route, but rather because there are multiple. It isn’t difficult to imagine that such everyday scenarios may lead to absurd results. Therefore, the proposed new requirement should either be changed to reflect a significant deference to the route selected by the condemnor, or should be removed altogether.
HB 630 has many more provisions that change Kentucky’s eminent domain laws in other ways. HB 630 addresses some of the tensions between conservation and development that we’ve come to see in Kentucky. At first, it might seem that HB 630 strikes a fair balance in the process of eminent domain, but not all that glitters is gold. By preventing development on hundreds of thousands of acres of land, the legislation would severely and negatively impact public projects in Kentucky. Further, requiring a condemnor to state that there are no reasonable alternate locations for a project may lead to absurd results when there are multiple reasonable options available. HB 630 attempts to strike a balance between two competing interests in the Commonwealth, but it needs significant reworking before it would be right for Kentucky.
[i] See Grid Deployment Office, Bringing More Clean Energy to Our Electric Grid, U.S. Dept. of Energy (Nov 3, 2023), https://www.energy.gov/gdo/articles/bringing-more-clean-energy-our-electric-grid [https://perma.cc/D9ZW-962E].
[ii] See Ky. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 416.540; U.S. Const. amend. V.
[iii] See Ky. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 416.150; Ky. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 416.210.
[iv] See Land Conservation Options with KNP, Ky. Energy & Env’t Cabinet (last visited Nov. 20, 2025), https://eec.ky.gov/Nature-Preserves/conserving_natural_areas/Pages/Land-Protection.aspx [https://perma.cc/WN6V-UFRZ].
[v] See H.R. 630, 2025 Reg. Sess. (Ky. 2025); Diane Dyer, Committee Examines Potential Changes to Eminent Domain Law, BeechTreeNews (Jul 31, 2025), https://beechtreenews.com/articles/committee-examines-potential-changes-eminent-domain-law [https://perma.cc/B2DL-CBK7].
[vi] See H.R. 630, 2025 Reg. Sess. (Ky. 2025).
[vii] See id.; Ky. Rev. Stat. 278.020(1)(a).
[viii]Agricultural Districts, Ky. Energy & Env’t Cabinet (last viewed Nov 3, 2025), https://eec.ky.gov/Natural-Resources/Conservation/Pages/Agricultural-Districts.aspx [https://perma.cc/YX8X-DQV2].
[ix] See generally Our Work, Ky Natural Lands Trust (last viewed Nov 3, 2025), https://knlt.org/our-work/ [https://perma.cc/Z633-AQGX]; Ensuring Our Future, Bluegrass Land Conservancy (last viewed Nov 3, 2025) https://www.bluegrasslandconservancy.org/ [https://perma.cc/329T-358M].
[x] See Sammy Roth, How a Federal Agency is Blocking America’s Largest Wind Farm, Los Angeles Times (Aug. 5, 2021); Mazie Leftwich, The Spirit of Eminent Domain, International Right of Way Association Magazine, Nov./Dec. 2017, at 38.
[xi] See Ky. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 278.030(1).
[xii] See H.R. 630, 2025 Reg. Sess. (Ky. 2025).
[xiii] See id.