Leadership-Backed Amendment Eliminates House Bill's Local Preemptions

• 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.

Update: after a lengthy floor debate, the amendment passed just before 7:30 PM on a 110-85 vote.
A major development in the impact fee debate is underway on the House floor.
Republican Representative Matt Baker has offered an amendment eliminating HB 1950’s language “superseding and preempting” local zoning regulations. His amendment, which is backed by House Republican leadership, would mirror the language in SB 1100, which the Senate is expected to pass later this evening.
Instead of an across-the-board ban on local ordinances, the measure would

let town­ships and bor­oughs set their own drilling reg­u­la­tions, as long as the restric­tions are in line with zon­ing for other types of con­struc­tion and man­u­fac­tur­ing sites.
If a driller views a munic­i­pal­i­ties’ zon­ing as unrea­son­able, it can appeal to the Attor­ney Gen­eral. And if the AG agrees, the local gov­ern­ment wouldn’t receive any impact fee money.

Here’s the amendment:

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