How Pennsylvania's Impact Fee Would Restrict Local Zoning

Scott Detrow

Recent Stories

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.

December 1, 2011 | 12:25 PM

Scott Detrow / StateImpact Pennsylvania

Both impact fee bills bar local governments from barring drilling in residential zones

Here’s StateImpact’s All Things Considered report on how the latest version of a Marcellus Shale impact fee would restrict local governments’ ability to regulate hydraulic fracturing and drilling activity.

The full report:

A new Pennsylvania law could curb municipalities’ ability to zone and regulate hydraulic fracturing — “fracking.” And that raises questions about how much say a local government should have over what goes on within its borders.
State lawmakers are grappling with how to update the commonwealth’s decades-old Oil and Gas Act to catch up with a natural gas drilling boom.
Right now, local regulations on where drilling rigs can go, how loudly they operate and how far they need to be from buildings differ from community to community. Pennsylvania lawmakers who support the natural gas drilling industry are trying to standardize the rules across the state.
“It can be like the equivalent of needing to get a new driver’s license for every state that you go through when you’re traveling,” says Kathryn Klaber, head of the Marcellus Shale Coalition, which represents drillers in Pennsylvania.