House Impact Fee Would Overrule Local Drilling Ordinances

What hap­pens next on the impact fee front? That’s up to House Repub­li­can lead­ers, now that the Sen­ate has delayed a vote on its plan for two weeks.

Major­ity Leader Mike Turzai is back­ing a mea­sure being drafted by Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Brian Ellis, which will include pro­vi­sions backed by the Cor­bett Administration.

Among the Corbett-approved lan­guage: a pro­vi­sion bar­ring munic­i­pal­i­ties from set­ting their own drilling reg­u­la­tions. As the Post-Gazette reports, this goes much fur­ther than the Senate’s “model ordi­nance” provision.

That pro­posal, which has the back­ing of House Repub­li­can lead­ers pre­vi­ously quiet on the issue, also would stan­dard­ize incon­sis­tent local zon­ing rules through­out Penn­syl­va­nia, said House Major­ity Leader Mike Turzai, R-Bradford Woods.

He noted that a “statewide uni­form stan­dard” is impor­tant to the gov­er­nor, who used that phrase in out­lin­ing his Mar­cel­lus Shale pol­icy plan.

“That’s some­thing that we’re going to have to dis­cuss,” said Mr. Cor­bett in his early Octo­ber pol­icy speech. “The one thing that we def­i­nitely need is con­sis­tent uni­form appli­ca­tion of the rules across the state.”

Since then, the Cor­bett admin­is­tra­tion has urged law­mak­ers and staffers to include a pro­vi­sion that would com­pletely pre-empt local zon­ing ordi­nances on oil and gas drilling. An admin­is­tra­tion spokesman declined to con­firm that the admin­is­tra­tion is push­ing for state con­trol of drilling rules, but he did say the gov­er­nor believes local rules are too fragmented.

Allow­ing state rules to super­sede all local reg­u­la­tions on gas drilling would impact the dozens of south­west­ern Penn­syl­va­nia munic­i­pal­i­ties — such as Mount Pleas­ant in Wash­ing­ton County and South Fayette — that have adopted their own ordinances.

House GOP law­mak­ers will be deter­min­ing whether they can sup­port iden­ti­cal statewide rules for gas drilling as they dis­cuss the pro­posal in closed-door cau­cus meet­ings this week.