PG: Many Local Officials Hold Drilling Leases

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.

October 18, 2011 | 3:00 PM

Scott Detrow / StateImpact Pennsylvania

A well pad on a Tioga County farm

In many Marcellus Shale-rich counties, the local officials setting drilling policies have signed leasing deals, on their private property.
More from the Post-Gazette.

In Washington County, which has seen heavy gas well drilling in recent years, 27 percent of local elected officials have signed drill leases.
Of the 349 elected officials representing 66 municipalities countywide, 94 hold leases that were signed during the past four years, county records show.
There are 15 municipalities in which the majority of council members and supervisors have leases.
Another six municipalities are governed entirely by leaseholders, including mostly rural and sparsely populated areas such as Carroll, Blaine, Donegal, Morris, Green Hills and South Franklin.
In Carroll, near Monongahela, each of the three township supervisors has a gas lease, along with township solicitor Herman Bigi, tax collector Timothy A. Matesich, code enforcement officer Dennis Butler and three of five planning commission members.