Some NY Towns Want Fracking, Association Doesn’t Speak for Them
New York State is drama central when it comes to whether or not shale drilling will happen. The big drama is whether the dithering Andrew Cuomo will finally make a decision and stick to it—he’s been called “Hamlet on the Shale” for his indecisiveness by no less than the New York Times. The second biggest drilling-related drama concerns where drilling will happen and whether or not local municipalities can control it. A pair of court cases heads for a hearing in March to help determine that.
As MDN has covered ad nauseam in the past, the town of Dryden (in Tompkins County) and Middlefield (in Otsego County) were sued to overturn their bans on the practice of hydraulic fracturing. Those court cases will be heard in March at the Appellate Court level. The New York State Association of Towns filed an “Amicus Brief” (“friend of the court” brief) supporting the two towns’ right to ban fracking. However, a group of towns in the Southern Tier of New York have filed their own letter with the Appellate Court that says in essence, “Wait a minute, NYSAT doesn’t speak for us!”
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This is without a doubt the most difficult article MDN has had to author—on many levels. Yesterday, New York’s Commissioner of the Dept. of Environmental Conservation (DEC), Joe Martens, announced he would not release the Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement (SGEIS) today, Feb. 13, because of a delay he’s blaming on the state health department. We previously reported that if the SGEIS was not released today, final regulations would not be adopted by Feb. 27 to allow fracking to move forward. In a statement yesterday, Martens 
A quick reminder that in spite of the impending snow storm which will be cleaned up by sometime Saturday, MDN editor Jim Willis will attend the 2pm Sunday, Feb. 10 screening of Phelim McAleer’s new documentary FrackNation at Regal Cinemas Binghamton 12 on Front Street in Binghamton. Phelim will be there! We’d like you to come along and watch it too (free). Here are the details:
Pennsylvania is doubling their natural gas output every year by using fracking. So is West Virginia. Ohio has now joined the fracking club and is ramping up their natural gas production. All of the states in the northeast “neighborhood” are fracking—without water contamination, without pollution problems, without a negative impact on “public health,” et cetera et cetera. All except New York, which continues to dither over its decision to frack. Why? Politics. Not science, not health concerns. Politics.