Cecil Township Exploring Legal Challenge to Marcellus Shale Law

Elizabeth Cowden said her mother used to have a saying: There's no use crying over spilled milk.

And the Cecil supervisor told fellow board members Monday night that a legal challenge to the state's new Marcellus Shale drilling law would amount to doing just that.

"It is now law," Cowden said of . "This is what we have to live with."

Her comments came during a more than hour-long, sometimes hostile special meeting Monday night—one where people screamed out and heckled, with one senior citizen being asked to leave after her frequent outbursts interrupted those speaking.

Mary Dalbo, a mainstay at meetings and staunch , stood up and shouted at the board until Chairman Mike Debbis asked her to either leave or sit down.

Still other residents said that the board should mount a legal challenge against the new regulations in an attempt to keep zoning control and protections at a local level—despite assertions from Cowden and others that both the legal fees and chance of losing were too high to entertain the idea.

(D-Cecil) even weighed in on the matter, telling Cowden and those in attendance that such a challenge wasn't unheard of, and wouldn't necessarily cost an exorbitant amount of money.

But it took a motion by Supervisor Andy Schrader at the board meeting that followed to make it formal—a motion that authorized solicitor John Smith to investigate a possible legal challenge to the new law.

That motion passed by a vote of 4-1, with Cowden casting the dissenting vote.