Negotiations are said to have gone on behind closed doors to come up with a version of the Impact Fee legislation that could be pushed through the legislature as early as Monday or Tuesday. Please call your legislators and tell them to say NO to the Impact Fee bill. It only takes a few minutes. Not sure who your legislator is? Find out here! Not sure why it’s important? Take a close look at the image and read on!
Before the holiday break, the House had passed their bill, HB 1950, that was pretty much Corbett’s proposal put in the form of a bill. It eliminated local control over drilling operations. Not drilling. Drilling operations. In other words, municipalities would be stripped of control over operations that include drilling but also include operations that take place hundreds of miles from the nearest well pad. Meanwhile, the Senate passed its own bill, SB 1100, that had been getting most of the attention for months until the House rushed their bill to the floor in early November. The Senate bill also restricted local control by making municipalities adhere to a “model ordinance” if they hoped to receive impact fee dollars.
After the bills passed, they moved to the other chamber for consideration. The Senate softened the local control issue in the House bill a little by amending it and sent it back to the House. The House didn’t like their bill as amended and didn’t like the Senate bill. It looked like the next step would be to have a Conference Committee work out a piece of compromise legislation after the break. The closed-door negotiations that have been happening have taken the place of a true, transparent conference committee, so it’s hard to say what the compromise legislation may look like. At the end of the year, restriction of local control appeared to be the one thing both sides could agree on.
Anyone who is familiar with the sewage sludge fertilizer issue is familiar with something called the ACRE Law that passed in 2005. (Yes, we grow our food in land fertilized with human waste and everything else that goes down the drain.) It restricted local control over the spreading of sludge. When East Brunswick Township in Schuylkill County tried to write ordinances to restrict its use, then-Attorney General Tom Corbett sued the township. He famously wrote of this case, “There is no inalienable right to local self government.” When the people of Lynn Township, Lehigh County found E. coli in their water wells and feared that it was there because of the sludging in the area, they asked their township supervisors to make the sludging stop. They were told, correctly, that there was nothing that they could do, that the people would have to contact their State Rep to voice their complaints.
Pennsylvanians must not have their hands tied when the drillers decide to put a new well, a waste disposal unit, or a pipeline next to an elementary school, a playground, down Main Street, or down Your Street.
Image source: Texas Sharon Drilling Reform