Nine Republican Senators Speak Out Against Impact Fee

January 25, 2012 | 2:40 PM

By Scott Detrow

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Nine Repub­li­can state Sen­a­tors have signed a let­ter express­ing major con­cerns about local zon­ing restric­tions within the nat­ural gas drilling impact fees passed by both the House and Senate.

(Read the let­ter after the jump.)

The leg­is­la­tors say they’re on board with a plan to allow the Attor­ney General’s office to chal­lenge “unrea­son­able” local drilling restric­tions, but write, “we feel the lan­guage con­tained in the cur­rent ver­sion of the bill goes far beyond that con­cept and actu­ally works more like a model ordi­nance by specif­i­cally spelling out per­mit­ted uses.”

StateIm­pact Penn­syl­va­nia explained at length how the leg­is­la­tion would curb local zon­ing con­trols in this Novem­ber post.

Repub­li­cans hold a com­fort­able ten-seat major­ity in the Senate,but these nine Repub­li­cans could kill the impact fee’s chances of becom­ing law, if they remain opposed to the letter.

A close vote on an amend­ment to the first ver­sion of the Senate’s ver­sion of the impact fee illus­trates how that could happen.

The lan­guage, authored by Allegheny County Demo­c­rat Jim Ferlo, would have stripped the bill of all local zon­ing restric­tions. It failed on a rel­a­tively close 22–27 vote, after the Repub­li­can cau­cus spent a con­sid­er­able amount of energy whip­ping and count­ing its vote totals. Six of the nine Repub­li­cans who signed the let­ter voted “no” on that amend­ment.

What’s hap­pen­ing with the impact fee right now? House and Sen­ate Repub­li­can lead­ers are work­ing with the Cor­bett Admin­is­tra­tion to reach a final prod­uct bridg­ing the gap between the two cham­bers’ dif­fer­ences. (Among them: how high of a per-well fee to set; whether a fee would be admin­is­tered by coun­ties or the com­mon­wealth; how rev­enue would be distributed.)

Once an agree­ment is in place, the new lan­guage would be approved by a joint House-Senate con­fer­ence com­mit­tee. That would send the leg­is­la­tion back to both cham­bers for a final up or down vote, with no room for any new amend­ments to be offered.

Here’s the let­ter, which is signed by Sen­a­tors Richard Alloway, Ed Erick­son, Robert Tom­lin­son, John Raf­ferty, Stew­art Green­leaf, Pat Vance, Mike Folmer, Bob Men­sch, and Charles McIlhinney