New York Comptroller Calls For Drilling Impact Fund

Scott Detrow

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Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.

Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.

Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

August 9, 2011 | 1:00 PM

Checking in on our neighbors to the north…
As New York State officials prepare to lift the Empire State’s effective moratorium on hydraulic fracturing, Comtroller Thomas DiNapoli is calling for the creation of an “industry-supported fund to pay for potential environmental damage caused by [fracking].”
As the New York Times reports, the bill would take the shape of an impact fee:

The new legislation would require operators to post surety bonds for the natural gas drilling they undertake, so that money would be available if any contamination subsequently occurred, on either public or private property.
The state would also impose a surcharge on drilling permits to supplement the financing available for environmental cleanup, and state regulators could order immediate remediation after a drilling accident, or take control of a contaminated site to initiate emergency cleanup.