Fracking on the Ballot Box in Three Pa. Communities

• Susan Phillips
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  Susan Phillips tells stories about the consequences of political decisions on people's every day lives. She has worked as a reporter for WHYY since 2004. Susan's coverage of the 2008 Presidential election resulted in a story on the front page of the New York Times. In 2010 she traveled to Haiti to cover the earthquake. That same year she produced an award-winning series on Pennsylvania's natural gas rush called "The Shale Game." She received a 2013 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Journalism Award for her work covering natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania. She has also won several Edward R. Murrow awards for her work with StateImpact. In 2013/14 she spent a year at MIT as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow. She has also been a Metcalf Fellow, an MBL Logan Science Journalism Fellow and reported from Marrakech on the 2016 climate talks as an International Reporting Project Fellow. A graduate of Columbia School of Journalism, she earned her Bachelor's degree in International Relations from George Washington University.

Voters in three Pennsylvania communities will decide whether or not to allow drilling in the Marcellus Shale. The referendums are the first time any Pennsylvania voters will weigh in directly on the controversial gas drilling method known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. It may also be the first time in the country, that voters get an up or down vote on energy development. Fracking uses high-pressure water, sand and chemicals to mine natural gas.
Other communities, such as Pittsburgh, have passed anti-fracking measures through their city council. But this new strategy by these home rule communities is meant to hold up better to any court challenges.
For communities experiencing the drilling boom, county and local-level officials do not have much authority to regulate drilling. Peter Buckland lives in State College and helped organize the borough’s referendum.
“Harrisburg has been totally failing to adequately regulate, leaving local municipalities to do it more stringently because we haven’t been protected.”
Marcellus Shale does not lie beneath State College. But referendum organizers say they’re protecting themselves from fracking the Utica Shale, which lies deeper than the Marcellus. The ballot referendum in State College did not get much push back from opponents.
But in Peters Township, near Pittsburgh, referendum opponents have distributed no-vote fliers and robocalls. The Peters Township Council tried to get the referendum off the ballot, and have spent tax payer money for no-vote campaign material. Speaking on a cable access channel, Peters Township City Councilman David Ball says a vote to ban fracking will bankrupt the community.
“The lawsuits are inevitable,” said Ball. “The gas companies are not gonna sit there and say ‘oh gee we just paid hundreds of millions of dollars for all these leases so I guess we’ll walk away.’”
The referendums come on the heels of a state House committee measure passed to prevent municipalities from enacting any local zoning regarding oil and gas drilling.
Ben Price is an organizer with the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, which is supporting the referendums in State College, Peters Township, and the Northwest Pennsylvania community of Warren City. Price says the provision in the latest impact fee bill, also known HB 1950, would nullify any local zoning authority for oil and gas drilling.
“It’s kind of a bizarre situation where we have the state legislature and the Governor proposing that the state enact laws to strip 12-and-a-half million Pennsylvanians of their self-governing authority in order to protect the priveledges of these drilling companies,” said Price.
It’s unclear whether that provision would render these referendums moot, if they do pass. But Price says he’s hopeful the referendums would hold up to court scrutiny, even if the language of HB 1950 remains, and gets approved by the legislature.

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