Reuters: NY Suit Could Set Local Zoning Precedent

Checking in on our neighbors to the north… Reuters reports on a drilling company’ lawsuit challenging a local community’s natural gas drilling ban. The suit will likely have broad implications, as New York State begins its ramp-up toward hydraulic fracturing, over the coming months and years:

Anschutz Exploration Corporation filed suit in state Supreme Court in Tompkins County on Friday against the town of Dryden, a rural suburb of Ithaca with about 13,000 residents, where last month local officials amended the zoning law to expressly ban all gas drilling within the town’s unincorporated borders.
The suit, which asks the court to invalidate the amendment, is the first to test the legal implications of the state’s lifting its ban on fracking, which involves injecting millions of gallons of water, sand and chemicals into rock formations to release the gas trapped inside. Critics say the intensive method has the potential to pollute water and air, as well as create industrial traffic and damage roads in rural areas.
Anschutz, which owns more than 22,000 acres of land in Dryden, is arguing that New York’s Environmental Conservation Law (ECL) bars local governments from any regulation of drilling.
But officials in Dryden and other towns considering their own restrictions on gas extraction say the law prohibits them only from regulating the drilling itself, and not from regulating where, or whether, it can take place.

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