A Peek At Closed-Door Impact Fee Negotiations

Scott Detrow

Recent 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.

December 5, 2011 | 11:21 AM

Lawmakers are back in Harrisburg this week, and many are framing the coming days as a “do or die” window for a Marcellus Shale impact fee, if there’s any hope of passing the bill into law in 2011.
Capitolwire has an update on how closed-door negotiations between House and Senate leaders are progressing:

…While talks grind forward, to use a culinary metaphor, nobody knows yet if the bill is going to be a cake and needs more sugar, or going to be a casserole and needs more salt and meat.
For example, in one scenario, the House GOP and Gov. Tom Corbett would still win on the issue of having the counties impose whatever fee is enacted, but their power to set that fee may be limited or the amount of the fee may just be mandated, negotiators said.
But if counties chose not to impose the fee, then the voters in the municipalities in the county could then vote to bind the county to impose it. Not clear if that is saleable to the Senate or not, but it seems as if they get sufficient other concessions, it is possible that might pass muster in the senior chamber.
For that to happen, the fee itself would be closer to the Senate level, $360,000 per well over 20 years, compared to the House’s $160,000 per well, and no fee after 10 years.