OH Anti Groups File Lawsuit in Supreme Court re Home Rule Ballots
Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Example: Ohio anti-fossil fuelers repeatedly suing to achieve the right to ban drilling and pipelines in local municipalities. Earlier this year the Ohio Supreme Court struck down so-called home rule laws in the state (see OH Supreme Court Strikes Down Home Rule in Gas Drilling Case). Anti-drillers, being manipulated by the out-of-state Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) attempted to get the very same measures on the November ballot in three counties, but those efforts were correctly struck down last week by Ohio’s Secretary of State John Husted as a waste of taxpayer time and money, because if they passed, they would be illegal (see OH Anti-Drilling November Ballot Measures Tossed in 3 Counties). What do the anti-drillers do? They file a lawsuit against Husted’s decision–in Ohio Supreme Court. The very same court that previously struck down “home rule” in February of this year. Yes, they ARE insane!…
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The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, located in New York State, released a decision yesterday in a case known as Beardslee v. Inflection Energy, LLC (copy of the decision is embedded below) that may create problems for future shale drilling in New York State–should the existing statewide ban ever be lifted. Yesterday’s decision is good news for landowners in one sense–it officially upholds the right of Tioga County, NY landowners party to the lawsuit to be released from old leases made in pre-Marcellus days when landowners signed leases for $3 per acre. Those leases were signed before the words “Marcellus” or “Utica” meant anything other than municipalities in New York State. (Interesting factoid: both shale plays are named after the NY towns where they were first identified. Further interesting factoid: both Marcellus, NY and Utica, NY banned fracking before the statewide ban was official.) The Second Circuit upheld a previous decision which we first wrote about in 2012 (see 
The Chief of the Division of Oil and Gas Resources Management for the Ohio Dept. of Natural Resources (currently Rick Simmers) is a man with a lot of power. He has the power, according to a ruling just handed down on August 12, to make his own decisions about suspending permits to operate in the absence of specific violations of a law or regulation. In September 2014 Simmers suspended permits for two wastewater injection wells in Trumbull County, OH after a very low level earthquake was detected close to those wells (an earthquake that couldn’t be felt at the surface and caused no damage of any kind). American Water Management Services sued saying they hadn’t violated any laws or regulations on the books and their permits could not just be arbitrarily revoked like that. But the Ohio Oil and Gas Commission said nope–Tom Cruise, er, a, Mr. Simmers can arbitrarily do what he wants when there is no specific rule or guideline or law–because he has the best interests of the people at heart…
Everybody’s suing everybody. That about sums up the mess created (sadly) by none other than Aubrey McClendon. The subsidiary businesses that were once part of McClendon’s new company, American Energy Partners (AEP), continue to run away from Aubrey as fast as they can. On Monday, Ascent Resources, once called American Energy Appalachia Holdings but separated from the AEP mothership in June (see