Programming Note: StateImpact On All Things Considered

• Scott Detrow
  BioRecent Stories

  

  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.

A programming note: a StateImpact Pennsylvania report on local zoning restrictions within the latest impact fee legislation will air on NPR’s All Things Considered this afternoon. (We’ll post a link once the story goes live on NPR.org.)
Looking for a refresher on how the legislation limits municipalities’ ability to regulate drilling? Here’s our primer on the issue:

The leg­is­la­tion requires munic­i­pal­i­ties’ ordi­nances to “pro­vide for the rea­son­able devel­op­ment of min­er­als.” What’s rea­son­able? By and large, that’s for the Attor­ney Gen­eral and the Com­mon­wealth Court to decide. But the bills both set para­me­ters local gov­ern­ments would be required to follow.
Munic­i­pal­i­ties would have to:

• Com­plete per­mit reviews within thirty days.
• Allow oil and gas oper­a­tions and impound­ment pools in all zones, includ­ing residential.
• Allow com­pres­sor sta­tions and nat­ural gas pro­cess­ing plants in agri­cul­tural and indus­trial zones.
• Keep drilling reg­u­la­tions in line with exist­ing con­struc­tion and indus­trial zon­ing. That means a town­ship wouldn’t be able to set one stan­dard for noise emit­ted by com­pres­sor sta­tions, and another for fac­to­ries within its borders.

The leg­is­la­tion also sets a manda­tory 300-foot buffer zone between well pads and res­i­den­tial build­ings. Com­pres­sor sta­tions would need to be 750 feet from build­ings, and could not exceed a sound of 60 deci­bels at the adjoin­ing prop­erty line.

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About StateImpact Pennsylvania

StateImpact Pennsylvania is a collaboration among WITF, WHYY, and the Allegheny Front. Reporters Reid Frazier, Rachel McDevitt and Susan Phillips cover the commonwealth’s energy economy. Read their reports on this site, and hear them on public radio stations across Pennsylvania.

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