Drillers Answer Impact Fee Questions

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.

March 12, 2012 | 1:30 PM

Bradford County hosts more than 1,000 spudded wells, and would generate about a quarter of Pennsylvania’s 2012 impact fee revenue — nearly $50 million — if the county enacts the levy.
And as we’ve noted, Bradford is the only major drilling county where commissioners are actively considering voting against the fee. With that in mind, the Towanda Daily Review sent a questionnaire to the drilling companies active in Bradford County, asking how a $50,000-a-well levy would impact their operations:

The Daily Review asked several gas drilling companies a series of questions to find out how they would be affected if such an impact fee were levied in Bradford and Sullivan counties. The questions were posed to Chesapeake Energy Corp., Talisman Energy USA Inc., Chief Oil & Gas, Southwestern Energy Co., and EOG Resources Inc.. All of the companies, except EOG Resources, supplied written answers to the questions. Printed below are the highlights of their answers:

For the most part, the companies said a fee would not impact their decisions on where to drill, what roads to repave, and how much money they donate to municipalities.