Quinn Pushes Her Impact Fee Bill, As Lawmakers Return To Harrisburg

• 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.

After a lengthy summer recess – these breaks tend to be longer, when the budget’s passed on-time – lawmakers return to the state Capitol in Harrisburg today.
Among the fall priorities for Governor Corbett and legislative leaders: passing some sort of impact fee on natural gas drillers. To-date, Senate President Pro Tem Joe Scarnati’s plan has been viewed as the legislation most likely to be voted into law. But, the Corbett Administration is now working on its own bill. As soon as the governor’s plan is released, it will certainly become the focal point of impact fee discussions.

Still, there are nearly a dozen different plans out there. Each charges a different rate, and distributes money to local governments (and sometimes the state) with a unique formula. House Republican Marguerite Quinn took to the pages of the Philadelphia Inquirer this morning to tout her plan, which she introduced in this spring:

That legislation, House Bill 1700, would raise revenue by assessing an impact fee starting at $50,000 on every well using the hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” process to extract shale gas. The fee would decline as time passes and as production decreases. It would generate $400,000 per well in the first 10 years, which is more than any other fee proposal introduced to date.
This legislation was designed to be balanced, meaningful, and politically feasible. Gov. Corbett has repeatedly said that he would not sign a bill that imposes a tax on the gas-drilling industry to raise general revenue for the state. He has, however, expressed support for a fee to be used to mitigate the impact the industry has on communities.

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