A Chorus of Environmentalists Decry Shale Bills

Susan Phillips

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Susan Phillips tells stories about the consequences of political decisions on people's every day lives. She has worked as a reporter for WHYY since 2004. Susan's coverage of the 2008 Presidential election resulted in a story on the front page of the New York Times. In 2010 she traveled to Haiti to cover the earthquake. That same year she produced an award-winning series on Pennsylvania's natural gas rush called "The Shale Game." She received a 2013 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Journalism Award for her work covering natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania. She has also won several Edward R. Murrow awards for her work with StateImpact. In 2013/14 she spent a year at MIT as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow. She has also been a Metcalf Fellow, an MBL Logan Science Journalism Fellow and reported from Marrakech on the 2016 climate talks as an International Reporting Project Fellow. A graduate of Columbia School of Journalism, she earned her Bachelor's degree in International Relations from George Washington University.

January 17, 2012 | 2:35 PM

Mary Wilson / WITF

Environmentalists rallied in Harrisburg on Tuesday to oppose the proposed Impact Fee bills.

WITF’s Mary Wilson reports from Harrisburg on today’s rally against the Impact Fee bills. Wilson says activists repeatedly broke into chants of “Kill the bill!”

About a hundred activists took to the Capitol Rotunda steps today, a lively Greek chorus to punctuate the spiels of activists, clergy, and a former local official calling on state lawmakers to spear the working proposals for a Marcellus Shale impact fee.
The crowd booed mentions of the municipal “preemption” language in both House and Senate measures (the preemption language is gone, as StateImpactPA has reported), hissed the proposed levels of impact fees, and repeatedly broke into chants of “Kill the bills!”

For more on the rally and the reaction from lawmakers, read Mary’s story at www.witf.org.