Your Friday Morning Impact Fee Update

Scott Detrow

Recent Stories

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.

October 7, 2011 | 9:44 AM

The Post-Gazette talks to southwestern Pennsylvania county commissioners, about their reservations on Governor Corbett’s proposed impact fee.
As we’ve reported all week, the Corbett plan would leave it up to the counties to assess and collect a levy on natural gas drillers.

Some southwestern commissioners said they would prefer a more uniform method for mitigating their drilling-related costs.
“I think it’s the state’s responsibility to lay out how the policy should work,” said Greene County Commissioner Pam Snyder. “We do not want this to pit county against county.”
Under the governor’s proposal, each county with shale gas wells would be able to decide whether to charge a fee, and if so, how much to assess up to a certain figure. Those rates cannot exceed $40,000 for a well’s first year, $30,000 for its second, $20,000 in the third and $10,000 in years four through 10.
That flexibility drew immediate concerns from both Democrats and Republicans, who said it would create a fragmented system where some counties have a fee and others do not.