Your Severance Tax Update (Maryland and Ohio Edition)

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.

March 27, 2012 | 10:56 AM

Going through severance tax and impact fee withdrawal? Never fear – two neighboring states are in the midst of debates over whether or not to raise the levies they assess to natural gas drillers.
In Maryland, the House of Delegates has approved a tax on gas extraction:

The House of Delegates has passed a 7.5 percent state severance tax on the wholesale market value of natural gas extracted from the Marcellus Shale in western Maryland.
The House voted 82-51 on Monday evening to approve the measure.
Last week, lawmakers changed the bill to cut the initially proposed tax in half from 15 percent.

And in Ohio, Republican legislators are pushing back against Governor John Kasich’s proposal to increase Ohio’s severance tax, and then use the revenue to lower Ohio income tax rates:

Kasich, a 59-year-old former congressman and Fox News commentator, today told reporters on a conference call that the Republican-controlled Ohio House of Representatives won’t consider the plan he unveiled March 14. That won’t deter him from trying to get it enacted in an effort to raise money for an income-tax cut for individuals and small businesses, he said.
“Special interests have a different point of view than I have on this,” Kasich said, declining to identify them. “This appears to be the first inning of what’s going to be a long ballgame.”

Analysts estimate Pennsylvania’s per-well impact fee amounts to a one-to-three percent tax on drilling, depending on the floating rate, which is based on natural gas prices. This year, drillers will pay $50,000-per-well