Bradford County Authorizes Impact Fee

• 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.

The authors of Pennsylvania’s new natural gas drilling impact fee can breathe a little easier now: Bradford County has authorized the per-well levy.
Republican County Commissioners Doug McLinko and Daryl Miller both oppose the fee, but voted to enact it. “Honestly, I didn’t like the bill,” said McLinko in a phone interview, but “in the end everyone knew it was geared to pass.” He said the commissioners opted “to stick together as a county.”
McLinko was referencing a provision that allows municipalities to override county commissioners’ decision on the fee. If the Bradford County board had voted no, its townships and boroughs could have enacted the fee anyway, if more than half of them passed resolutions enabling it.

Why does Bradford’s decision matter so much? Because the fee is based on “spudded” – or drilled – wells, and about a quarter of those are located in Bradford County. According to figures compiled by StateImpact Pennsylvania, Bradford will generate about a quarter of this year’s $200 million in fee revenue. If Bradford rejected the levy, state agencies would have much less fee revenue at its disposal.
The first round of fee payments is due September 1. That’s because yesterday’s Commonwealth Court injunction did not impact the fee side of the new legislation.

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