Fracking Hearings Begin In New York

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.

November 16, 2011 | 3:06 PM

$nyfracking$

Katherine Nadeau / Environmental Advocates of New York

The room is full in Dansville, New York

Public hearings on New York State’s new hydraulic fracturing regulations began today. According to a picture posted to Twitter by Katherine Nadeau of Environmental Advocates of New York, the Dansville session is packed with people.
North Country Public Radio explains the point of the four sessions:

The public will have a chance to comment on what’s called the Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement, or SGEIS, with the hopes of swaying state regulators.
Joe Martens is commissioner of the DEC, the agency that is crafting the SGEIS. He says the thousands of public comments received on a previous SGEIS draft have resulted in changes.
“I’m confident that we’ll make plenty of changes as a result of the input we get from the public this time around.”
Martens says there were two major changes that came from previous public comments. One was a recommendation to prohibit drilling on state lands. The other was a safeguard for the Syracuse and New York City watersheds.

Here’s the full hearing schedule, from the New York Department of Environmental Conservation website:

Nov. 16: Dansville Middle School Auditorium, 31 Clara Barton St., Dansville, NY 14437

Nov. 17: The Forum Theatre, 236 Washington Street, Binghamton, NY, 13901

Nov. 29: Sullivan County Community College, Seelig Theatre, 112 College Rd, Loch Sheldrake, NY 12759

Nov. 30: Tribeca Performing Arts Center, 199 Chambers Street, New York, NY, 10007

Meantime, the drilling industry is holding its own counterprogramming tour, to tout extraction’s economic benefits. More from our friends at Innovation Trail:

Geneva, N.Y. was the sixth stop in a series of seven public meetings called “Fuel for Thought” hosted by New York’s Independent Oil and Gas Association (IOGA), a trade group representing drilling companies.
About 50 people turned out to a junior high school last night, as a panel of three representatives from the drilling industry took the stage for a question and answer session about hydrofracking.
Adam Schultz, an attorney from Syracuse, was one of the panelists. He told the audience that concerns about hydrofracking often arise because it’s unfamiliar.
“Once people see it can touch it, feel it, they become more comfortable with it,” Schultz said.