County Commissioners Disagree With Corbett On Fee Plan

• 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.

Pennsylvania’s county commissioners aren’t on board with a major aspect of Governor Corbett’s Marcellus Shale impact fee proposal.
Corbett wants counties, not the state, to implement and collect a fee. That raises “significant concerns,” according to County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania executive director Doug Hill.  CCAP’s members held a conference call to discuss the Corbett plan yesterday, and will send out a press release on their consensus within the hour.
Commissioners from several gas-producing counties, including Tioga, Bradford, Greene and Indiana, were on the call, according to Hill. Their main concern, he said, was that “we don’t want a hodgepodge. We think [a fee] needs to be done at one time, and uniformly.” A statewide rate, rather than a system where different counties implement different fees, would lead to “predictability,” he said.
Legislative leaders have raised similar concerns, but Corbett is sticking by his county-level plan. At a press conference yesterday, the Republican said local implementation is a critical component for him. “If the impact is in the county, they will deterimine whether they need [a fee] or not,” he argued.

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