Middlefield, NY Lawsuit: The Town’s Counterargument
MDN recently reported about two lawsuits filed (so far) in New York State that will set precedent in the state on the issue of whether or not local municipalities (i.e. townships) can ban gas drilling altogether within their borders.
One of those lawsuits, filed against the Town of Middlefield in Otsego County, was filed by landowner Jennifer Huntington (see the MDN story here). Her lawsuit says the town’s ban violates state law which stipulates only the state can regulate oil and gas drilling. The key word there is “regulate.”
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Every time MDN writes about our observation that those who oppose drilling do so from an ideology, we get pushback from the man-made global warming true believers. If you want to believe that man causes global warming, be my guest. But don’t expect me to “go green” so you can feel good about yourself. I don’t believe it—not a word of it. It’s not been proven by any kind of science that stands up to scrutiny. It’s all ethereal theories and conjecture—not real, testable, measurable, objective and verifiable science.
Early today, Norse Energy, a Norwegian company with gas drilling operations in New York State, issued an interesting press release about laying off half of their employees (see the full release below). Norse holds some 180,000 net acres of natural gas leases in New York, of which 130,000 are in the Marcellus and Utica Shale zones.
Anschutz Exploration this week will file a lawsuit against the Town of Dryden (NY) to strike down the town’s recently passed ban on gas drilling. Dryden is a small township with two villages—Dryden and Freeville—located in Tompkins County, near Ithaca. Its land area is 94.2 square miles with some 13,500 people living there.
As many of you have heard via the national media, the Binghamton, NY (Broome County) area—where much of the drilling in New York State is likely to occur once drilling begins—was just hit with the worst flooding in its history, after the previous “worst ever” flooding occurred only five years ago, in 2006. This type of flooding is referred to as a “100-year flood” and it causes the government to re-draw floodplain maps to indicate where such areas are capable of extreme flooding.
When it comes to hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking”, one size does not fit all with respect to regulation, and moratoriums. Most people caught up in the frenzy of opposing fracking, especially in New York, may not realize that there are thousands of wells drilled in New York State, right now, that are fracked every year, and have been going back for the past 60 years. And with no cases of groundwater contamination.
The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) issued a “final” draft version of proposed new drilling regulations yesterday (see link to full copy below) after incorporating new information it received from a private study about the industrialization affects of drilling on local communities. The new draft Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement (SGEIS) weighs in at 1,537 pages—a behemoth. DEC Commissioner Joe Martens set up a 90-day public comment period to end December 12th, instead of the previously promised 60-day period.
Last week, New York State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli made a pitch for taxing the gas drilling industry in New York to create a pool of money that can be used to clean up accidents that may occur. As MDN pointed out (