Impact Fees Front And Center In Harrisburg Today

• 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.

Today, Pennsylvania’s state Capitol is Shale Central.
The Senate will likely vote on SB 1100, which the Appropriations Committee amended yesterday to create a much broader impact fee structure than Governor Corbett’s proposed ten-year formula. The Senate measure now begins at $50,000-per-well. It gradually lowers to a $10,000-a-year fee, but stays in place for twenty, not ten, years.
The measure also shifts away from the “model ordinance” sponsor Joe Scarnati, the Senate President Pro Tem, has backed for much of the year. Instead, it would allow the Attorney General to “call balls and strikes” on local drilling ordinances, with the goal of blocking zoning deemed unreasonable, while still allowing municipalities to pass their own regulations.
Meantime, the House is debating, and possibly voting on, HB 1950. More than 100 amendments will slow the process to a crawl, so we’re more likely to see a final vote Wednesday, compared to today.
We’ll update you on all the twists and turns here at the StateImpact website, as well as explain what these dueling bills would mean for Pennsylvania’s economy, and your community.
Check back in a bit for a more detailed look at the new language in SB 1100.

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