Municipalities File Anti-Impact Fee Lawsuit

• 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.

Seven municipalities filed a lawsuit against the Department of Environmental Protection, the Public Utility Commission and the Attorney General’s Office in Commonwealth Court this afternoon. Their goal: stopping Pennsylvania’s new natural gas impact fee legislation.
As the Post-Gazette reports, the litigants take issue with the restrictions the new law places on local governments’ ability to zone and regulate drilling:

The suing municipalities argue that standardizing zoning rules for gas drilling is “an improper and arbitrary use of the commonwealth’s police power.” They claim that towns “will be left to plan around rather than plan for orderly growth” in their communities.
“By crafting a single set of statewide zoning rules applicable to oil and gas drilling throughout the commonwealth, the Pennsylvania General Assembly provided much sought-after predictability for the oil and gas development industry,” states the lawsuit.
“However, it did so at the expense of the predictability afforded to petitioners and the citizens of Pennsylvania whose health, safety and welfare, community development objectives, zoning districts, and concerns regarding property values were pushed aside to elevate the interests of out-of-state oil and gas companies and the owners of hydrocarbons underlying each property, who are frequently not the property owners.”

Southwestern municipal officials have been mobilizing against the impact fee’s zoning restrictions since before the bill became law. In December, StateImpact Pennsylvania attended a raucous Allegheny County meeting where township and borough officeholders slammed the legislation’s statewide standards.
The job enforcing these new guidelines will fall to the Public Utility Commission. For more on how the PUC will evaluate local regulations, click here.
We’ll have much more on the impact fee lawsuit tomorrow.

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