Sources: Corbett Will Announce Marcellus Shale Bill Monday

• 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.

Pencil it in: Monday is Shale Day.
Update (October 1, 12:22 PM): Read more details about Corbett’s planned announcement here.
According to multiple Capitol sources, Governor Tom Corbett will unveil his proposal for a broad Marcellus Shale bill on Monday. The details are still fuzzy, but the legislation would include a local impact fee on natural gas drillers.
Corbett has promised to avoid tax increases during his tenure as governor, but he’s come around on the idea of a localized fee, that would direct money to drilling-related efforts. He spelled out his thinking during a recent Philadelphia radio interview:

[Corbett] said the funds would not go into the gen­eral state bud­get, but would be used pri­mar­ily to com­pen­sate com­mu­ni­ties where drilling is tak­ing place for the dam­age to their roads and bridges from heavy truck traf­fic, and other neg­a­tive impact.
“The pri­mary amount of money — a huge amount of money — will go to the coun­ties; and let the coun­ties work with the munic­i­pal­i­ties,” Cor­bett told WPHT host Dom Gior­dano. “What comes to the state, in my mind, will be used exclu­sively for the and will be used for envi­ron­men­tal cleanup.”

The administration’s proposal is based on recommendations made by Corbett’s Marcellus Shale Advisory Commission, which released its report more than two months ago.
Both Corbett and Senate President Pro Tem Joe Scarnati have said they want a bill passed by year’s end. That will be tough to pull off, with just 24 scheduled session days remaining in the House, and 17 in the Senate.

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