Allegheny County Hits "Pause" On New Setbacks

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 28, 2012 | 3:57 PM

Allegheny County is preparing to approve an impact fee on natural gas wells within its borders. But as the Tribune-Review reports, the county is putting the breaks on regulations setting buffers between wells and buildings:

Council’s Economic Development & Housing Committee voted 2-0 today to recommend a fee on deep-shale oil and gas wells for final approval at council’s next full meeting. If passed under the state’s new oil and gas laws, the fee would raise about $270,000 for the county and its municipal governments to split in 2012, according to Tribune-Review calculations.
Other rules the committee discussed — to push drilling farther from schools, homes and water — it held for legal review. For more than a year Michael Finnerty, D-Scott, has sponsored a bill to prohibit drilling within 1,000 feet of homes and schools and 500 feet of surface water and drinking water sources, but it’s likely the state laws passed in February ban rules such as that from local governments.

The impact fee, now known as Act 13, bars local governments from enacting zoning regulations that go beyond its parameters. A 1,000-foot setback would do just that.