PA Municipalities Looking for Backdoor Drilling Ban

One Pennsylvania municipality is taking an unconventional route to maintain authority over natural gas drilling by focusing on its most important resource--fresh water.

The state House moved ahead with a natural gas drilling impact fee plan recently that includes enhanced environmental protections, such as requiring a greater distance between natural gas wells and water supplies.

But the bill also would allow the state to override local ordinances, which control how or where drilling can occur, leaving some municipalities in the Marcellus shale footprint uneasy. 

Places like Rush Township in western Centre County could be ground zero for that struggle. 

“I think it’s pretty apparent, and I think I speak for almost any municipality in the state when I say that we think we should have control over our own destiny,” said Michael Savage, chairman of the Rush Township Board of Supervisors. 

Located just west of State College, Rush Township has some of the best water in the state. The water flows directly from the heart of central Pennsylvania’s mountains and is a source for at least six different water companies, which serve the state, Savage said. 

Local officials last week considered a new ordinance that would establish zoning laws to block the natural gas drilling industry from locating its gas rigs in the township, which has nearly 3,500 residents. More than a dozen municipalities statewide--most notably in Pittsburgh--have enacted similar ordinances. 

Last week, the Centre County borough of State College approved a similar measure via referendum. 

The legality of these rules is questionable and could expose the municipalities to expensive legal battles, since zoning laws cannot be written to target one industry, said Rush Township Supervisor David Mason. The Pennsylvania State Association of Township Supervisors, which advocates and lobbies for townships, also has advised municipalities against pursuing those ordinances, which are being pushed by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, a national environmental law group.

Hoping to avoid those court battles, state lawmakers are looking to include a clause in the natural gas drilling impact fee bill that would supersede all local ordinances, strengthening the language in the state Oil and Gas Act.  Local governments would be banned from enacting specific ordinances to regulate oil and gas drilling.

But Rush Township, thanks to its abundance of fresh water, is pursuing a different course of action, with the goal of getting the state to protect their local water supplies. 

“We don’t want to do something that is symbolic; we wanted to do something that is real,” Savage said. “The bottom line is that we want to be able to protect our water supplies.” 

The township is considering an ordinance that would protect local aquifers under the state Department of Environmental Protection’s Source Water Protection Program. If approved, the township could block any activity that disrupts the surface and threatens the water supply, including natural gas drilling. 

But Mason said the proposed ordinance is not intended to target natural gas drilling.  

“Hydraulic fracturing is only one of the activities that we are trying to prevent,” Mason said. “We don’t want a dry cleaner or a gas station with underground petroleum tanks either, for example.” 

Drilling for natural gas requires a relatively new process called hydraulic fracturing, in which a hole is drilled to a depth of several thousand feet and filled with a high pressure mixture of water, chemicals, salt and sand. The high pressure of the mixture fractures the shale and allows the natural gas trapped within it to escape. 

Drilling to the shale requires passing through the water table. The hole is encased with steel and cement to prevent groundwater contamination. 

Mason said township supervisors are concerned that the state’s requirements for the casing are not strict enough to ensure water contamination does not occur. 

Terry Maenza, spokesman for Pennsylvania American Water, one of the companies that operates in Centre County and 35 other counties statewide, said the company has had no incidents of water supplies contaminated by natural gas drilling. 

“We are in business where drilling activity is taking place, and we are being as vigilant as we can,” Maenza said. He said the company works with state and local officials to ensure there are adequate environmental protections when drilling takes place near water supplies. 

By avoiding setting local rules that ban drilling and taking the issue to the state, Rush Township officials hope to avoid having their plans overruled by the General Assembly, Savage said. 

The drilling industry has been pushing for the passage of a uniform zoning code, because many of the 1,400 municipalities in the Marcellus shale footprint have their own rules and zoning provisions. 

“The establishment of a predictable framework of heightened health, safety and environmental protections will benefit all Pennsylvanians, particularly those residing in nearly half of the Commonwealth’s communities in the Marcellus fairway without formal zoning rules,” said Kathryn Klaber, president of theMarcellus Shale Coalition, an industry group. 

Klaber compared the situation to forcing a driver to obtain a different license in every town through which he drove while crossing the state. 

At a recent meeting of the House Finance Committee, which passed the bill on a straight party-line vote, minority Democrats did not agree with superseding local control of how and where natural gas drilling can take place. 

“The bill appears to take away what little control the municipalities had over ordinances,” said state Rep. Phyllis Mundy, D-Northampton, minority chairwoman of the committee. 

Republicans said the provisions, including the statewide zoning ordinance, were handed down by the Corbett administration. Unlike a proposal in the state Senate, which would force municipalities to adopt statewide zoning standards to collect revenue from the natural gas drilling impact fee, the House proposal would supersede and preempt local control without connecting it to the revenue. 

“Part of the goal is to have some uniformity across the commonwealth,” said state Rep. Kerry Benninghoff, R-Centre, chairman of the House Finance Committee. 

The state House is expected to pass the bill before Thanksgiving. State Senate Republicans see a natural gas drilling impact fee bill as their top priority for the end of the year.