Pennsylvania

Energy. Environment. Economy.

A New Proposal: Fund Environmental Efforts By Leasing Out More State Land For Drilling

September 22, 2011 | 11:42 AM
By Scott Detrow

Scott Detrow / StateIm­pact Pennsylvania

A Tioga County well pad

With a broad-based nat­ural gas sev­er­ance tax polit­i­cally unfea­si­ble, given Gov­er­nor Corbett’s veto threat, envi­ron­men­tal advo­cates are try­ing to fig­ure out how to fund statewide cleanup and green space pro­grams with drilling-based income.

The lat­est sug­ges­tion comes from for­mer Depart­ment of Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Sec­re­tary David Hess, in an inter­view with Capi­tol­wire. His idea? Lease out addi­tional state-owned land – but NOT for­est or park land – for drilling, and ded­i­cate the ensu­ing bonus and roy­alty pay­ments to funds like Grow­ing Greener.

You need a Capi­tol­wire sub­scrip­tion to read the entire arti­cle, but here’s the rel­e­vant section:

HARRISBURG (Sept. 21) – One of the biggest ques­tions yet to be resolved regard­ing this fall’s Mar­cel­lus Shale bill nego­ti­a­tions is how to fund var­i­ous envi­ron­men­tal pro­grams.
For­mer Depart­ment of Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion (DEP) sec­re­tary David Hess said “a three-legged stool” approach was needed to find alter­na­tive rev­enue sources. Those three legs of the stool, Hess aid, were: open­ing drilling to new state-owned land around high­ways, pris­ons and owned by other state agen­cies, not state forest­land; roy­al­ties from exist­ing state forest­land leases, and a drilling fee. He said they would be enough to fund the var­i­ous programs.

One of his DEP suc­ces­sors, John Hanger, dis­agreed, say­ing a drilling tax is the only way to fully fund those programs.

Hess elab­o­rated on the least-known of his three-part pro­posal: leas­ing drilling rights on rights-of-way owned by the Penn­syl­va­nia Depart­ment of Trans­porta­tion (Pen­nDOT), as well as other prop­er­ties owned by the wel­fare and cor­rec­tions depart­ments, and other agen­cies. Those gas rights leases would become a rev­enue stream to fund statewide envi­ron­men­tal pro­grams like Grow­ing Greener, Hess said.

“To me, drilling on state-owned land other than state forests has a lot of poten­tial,” Hess said Wednes­day in a phone interview.

Under cur­rent law, the Depart­ment of Con­ser­va­tion and Nat­ural Resources (DCNR), the Game Com­mis­sion and the Fish and Boat Com­mis­sion are the only agen­cies legally allowed to lease state prop­erty. How­ever, Hess said a bill mov­ing through the Sen­ate would allow the Depart­ment of Gen­eral Ser­vices (DGS) and the State Sys­tem of Higher Edu­ca­tion to lease other state-owned land. Hess esti­mated up to 100,000 acres may be lease-able.

Comments

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_T5AQOTQAX3TMF7AVYYRUW3THMY Julieann Woz­niak

    So we’re going to burn down the vil­lage in order to save it? And how will local busi­nesses be reim­bursed for the tourism dol­lars they lose as a result of this destruc­tive activ­ity? We’ve always sus­pected that the gov­ern­ment of the Com­mon­wealth has been bought and paid for by the nat­ural gas indus­try, this just makes it official.

  • Iris Marie Bloom

    I have inter­viewed over a dozen peo­ple with con­t­a­m­i­nated water, fouled air, and health impacts from high-volume hydrofrack­ing in Penn­syl­va­nia, and know of a thou­sand more with con­t­a­m­i­nated water from gas drilling.

    To sub­ject pow­er­less pris­on­ers to round-the-clock expo­sure to toxic byprod­ucts of shale gas oper­a­tions — car­cino­gens, neu­ro­tox­ins, bio­cides and endocrine dis­rupt­ing chem­i­cals which move through water and air — would be a human rights vio­la­tion. Play­ing roulette with pris­on­ers’ lives is not acceptable.

    Research has shown that a cer­tain per­cent­age of pris­on­ers are always inno­cent. Regard­less of their inno­cence or guilt, pris­on­ers are human beings, not guinea pigs. Cor­rec­tions offi­cers would also be at risk, but with much lower expo­sure rates, since they can come and go and con­trol what they eat, drink, and breathe.

    Gas fracking’s health impacts, such as the ris­ing breast can­cer rate in Texas’ Bar­nett Shale and the tide of arsenic poi­son­ing inci­dents in PA, are not yet under­stood. A Sep­tem­ber 19th, 2011 arti­cle in Sci­en­tific Amer­i­can doc­u­ments hor­ri­fy­ing cases of severe health impacts from gas drilling. It also shows that the indus­try, by non-cooperating with health stud­ies and tak­ing full advan­tage of its its fed­eral exemp­tions, has posi­tioned itself to keep physi­cians and sci­en­tists from get­ting the data they need to study health impacts.

    Not one cumu­la­tive envi­ron­men­tal or health impact study has taken place any­where in Pennsylvania.

    The best way to pro­tect life, prop­erty, health and human rights is to insti­tute a mora­to­rium on gas drilling in PA until cumu­la­tive impacts have been stud­ied and until we are sure that drilling could be done with­out acute health impacts, envi­ron­men­tal destruc­tion, or ground­wa­ter con­t­a­m­i­na­tion, and with­out long-term bio-accumulation which guar­an­tees future pub­lic health disasters.

    Our gov­er­nor and craven leg­is­la­tors know noth­ing about the sci­ence of bio-accumulation — the slow, dis­as­trous accu­mu­la­tion of poi­sons in our ecosys­tems, food chain and bod­ies — and noth­ing about their con­stituents’ con­t­a­m­i­nated water and health prob­lems — because they pre­fer not to know. They pre­fer to weakly chor­tle from inside the pock­ets of the indus­try while their con­stituents suffer.

    They will be voted out.

  • Anony­mous

    Inter­est­ing that Gov­er­nor Cor­bett has pro­posed clean­ing up the state parks with prison (slave) labor. Per­haps that judge who is doing 27 years for fun­nel­ing inno­cent youths into the prison-industrial– com­plex would vol­un­teer as a guinea pig. Per­son­ally I set­tled in Penn­syl­va­nia in part because it relied on user-fees to keep its pub­lic lands pris­tine and open. I hap­pily pay for my fish­ing license and sev­eral boat launch stick­ers each year to have the right to use these pub­lic lands. I do not expect the tax payer to sub­si­dize my recre­ation. If these lands are degraded I, per­son­ally, will move to another state. Not a great loss to the state I admit but some. So the state needs money, what else is new. How much does it cost to pun­ish low level non-violent offend­ers? How much to grant sub­si­dies to multi-national cor­po­ra­tions which will just pick up roots and move jobs over-seas if it saves them a few bucks. There are rev­enues to be col­lected but not from the peo­ples’ lands.

  • Jerry Sil­ber­man

    This pro­posal is really per­verse. It also shows the degree to which our polit­i­cal process has been turned into a money pit for large cor­po­ra­tions. The Cor­bett admin­is­tra­tion is truly ready to sell the future of the entire state, not to men­tion the health of cur­rent and future gen­er­a­tions, to an indus­try which is prob­a­bly not even viable with enor­mous gov­ern­ment sub­sidy. Brought to you by Repub­li­cans who resent fund­ing pub­lic schools and pub­lic health. We don’t need frack­ing, and we don’t need any tax rev­enues from it. We need healthy, sus­tain­able jobs that are not based in non-renewable resources.

  • Zan­dra Price

    Looks like folks liv­ing in the Mar­cel­lus shale are becom­ing a real prob­lem to the gas indus­try and the admin­is­tra­tion. Some of them have wised up to how truly inju­ri­ous to their air and water frack­ing really is and some peo­ple are protest­ing. So to ful­fill its com­mit­ment to fund­ing envi­ron­men­tal pro­grams DEP’s answer is to frack where there is nobody to fight back. Pris­on­ers, squir­rels, birds–what are they going to do? Peo­ple in prison–they must be bad or they wouldn’t be in prison so who cares if they have to breathe pol­luted air, drink toxic water, expe­ri­ence inces­sant noise and vibra­tion from com­pres­sor sta­tions and flar­ing, right? Pris­on­ers have less polit­i­cal clout than wildlife. But that does not make frack­ing on prison grounds right, just kind of dastardly.

  • brian oram

    How about No — What if PA used the weath of its tech­ni­cal experts to hire a con­sult to develop the wells for PA — Rather than just get­ting the roy­al­ity — we (The Peo­ple) — get all the pro­ceeds and not just 20% .

    What would you rather have 80 cents or 20 cents?

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