Capitolwire: Impact Fee Deal Taking Shape

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.

January 18, 2012 | 12:08 PM

With Pennsylvania legislators back in Harrisburg after the holiday break, Capitolwire is reporting slow but steady process toward an agreement on a natural gas drilling impact fee.
When we last left off, the House had “non-concurred” on the Senate’s latest version of a bill imposing a levy on each gas well, and overhauling Pennsylvania’s drilling regulations. The move was designed to set up a joint House-Senate conference committee.
Corbett says his goal is a final bill before next month’s budget address, which will set the 2012 legislative agenda.
Here’s Capitolwire’s update:

[Governor Tom] Corbett and House GOP leaders want the fees to total $160,000 over a decade per well. The Senate has proposed a fee that starts at $50,000 per well, and over 20 years, comes to $360,000 per well.
A compromise plan to lop off the last 10 years of the Senate plan, making the fee $260,000 per well over 10 years, is tentatively being examined by both sides. Depending on the number of wells being drilled, that could bring up to $150 million in initial revenues, estimates say.
In exchange for raising the fee halfway to Senate levels, the governor and House GOP leaders would get a key concession: the fee would be imposed by counties. The Senate has asked for an additional provision added to that, which is that if the county commissioners opt out of a fee, the county would have to impose the fee if municipalities representing 50 percent of the county voted to opt into the fee.