When I go to do road reconstruction, enormous amounts of effort (and money) are spent avoiding underground utilities. In the event they can't be avoided, the municipality is on the hook for (generally) half the relocation cost.

And they dont have to pay to have their stuff there in the first place.

The key part in this argument -

Guelph Coun. Leanne Caron says many of those agreements were signed decades ago, when natural gas was treated as a public good and Enbridge was still a Crown corporation. Today, Enbridge is a for-profit company and Caron says the old rules no longer match current economic, environmental or planning realities.

That basically sums it up. Turn back to a Crown Corp and continue gaining free access, or pay like the private corp you are.

Locally, as discussed in the article, they can use it to prop up small scale green infrastructure grants/loans which help further reduce the use of those gas pipelines, and reduce upsizing or new installation requirements.