Scarnati: Not giving revenue to towns that ban drilling
By Eric Boehm | PA Independent
HARRISBURG — Local government groups don’t want state officials to link the distribution of revenue from a proposed natural gas impact fee to whether municipalities pass a zoning ordinance banning natural gas drilling, while the natural gas industry supports the uniformity this zoning would provide statewide.
“The whole idea of having these decisions made in Harrisburg for zoning is just nuts,” said David Sanko, executive director of the Pennsylvania State Association of Township Supervisors, which lobbies for municipal interests. “This is something that very clearly is a local judgment.”
As part of bill, SB 1100, municipalities would be required to pass the model zoning ordinance — or a comparable one — in the bill to benefit from the revenue raised by a $10,000 per-well annual fee on the natural gas industry. The plan, put forth by Senate President Joe Scarnati, R-Jefferson, would split the revenue between local governments and locally operated environmental programs and infrastructure initiatives.
But the natural gas industry wants the model zoning ordinance, because they say it will streamline their operations by not forcing companies to deal with different rules in each municipality statewide.
“As opposed to the situation now, which is a multitude of various ones, some of which we don’t even know if they are constitutional,” said Gary Slagel, chairman of the Pennsylvania Independent Oil and Gas Association, an industry group representing smaller gas companies in the state.
Pennsylvania has 67 counties and more than 2,000 municipalities, with more than 1,400 of them in the Marcellus shale region, according to the Marcellus Shale Coalition, another industry group.
Terry Bossert, vice president of Chief Oil and Gas, one of the companies operating in the Marcellus shale region, said Pennsylvania’s large number of municipalities makes the state more expensive to operate in.
State Sen. Lisa Baker, R-Luzerne, announced this week she would introduce an amendment to eliminate the model ordinance from the Scarnati impact fee bill, citing opposition from local governments in her district.
Though the legislation has been drafted, it was not formally introduced.
Several other state senators joined Baker in expressing concern about state government overreaching its authority with the zoning ordinance, but the impact fee bill still moved to the state Senate with a unanimous vote in committee earlier this week.
Members of the state House who are pushing for the natural gas impact fee said they have the same concerns about the model ordinance. Neither of the House bills introduced this week to create an impact fee included the model local ordinance.
Lt. Gov. Jim Cawley, who serves as chairman of the on-going Marcellus Shale Commission, said the commission is expected to include the issue of the model ordinance among its final recommendations.
The commission will make policy recommendations to Gov. Tom Corbett on July 22. The final meeting of the commission is scheduled for July 15.
Drew Crompton, Scarnati’s chief of staff, said the language in SB 1100 leaves considerable autonomy for local government officials to determine zoning issues.
“Senator Scarnati is committed to the policy that if a township decided to prohibit shale drilling in its jurisdiction, it should not reap benefits from an impact fee,” Crompton said.
Bossert said the industry also is concerned that some municipalities are deliberately changing their zoning code to ban natural gas drilling in violation of the state’s Oil and Gas Act, including the high profile example of Pittsburgh.
“Our view is that there ought to be some reasonable local regulations, but they ought not to be able to go to the point of, directly or indirectly, barring us from reasonable recovery of the resources,” Bossert said.
Sanko responded that if zoning codes excluding natural gas drilling are unconstitutional or in violation of existing state laws, they should be challenged in court, not through legislation or executive action.
