PA DEP Sec Quigley Fumbles Questions at House Budget Hearing
Yesterday PennFutureDEP Acting Sec. John Quigley appeared before the PA House budget hearing to answer questions about Gov. Tom Wolf’s budget proposals for the Dept. of Environmental Protection (i.e. cheerlead and support the highest tax increase on drillers in the state’s history). Quigley was asked why he had fired the members of the DEP’s Oil & Gas Technical Advisory Board (OGTAB)–something no incoming governor has done in a generation, Republican or Democrat (see Why did PA DEP Acting Sec Quigley Mass Fired Gas Advisory Board?). Quigley apparently fumbled around with the question and answered it later, after the meeting, saying the law required splitting the board in two and, “We needed some new blood on the advisory board.” He was asked, during the hearing, who the new members would be on the newly constituted OGTAB. Quigley said he “couldn’t remember” and he later told reporters the board is appointed by the governor and that he “doesn’t do clerical work.” Apparently nominating and appointing a board with people who ultimately guide and control the very policies his department must enforce isn’t important enough for Quigley to bother with. Arrogant or out of touch, take your pick. Later that same day, after some underling got chewed out for Quigley’s poor performance, a press release was issued with the names of the OGTAB members…
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PA’s PennFutureDEP Acting Sec. John Quigley wants to get the big pipeline companies and the townships through which the pipelines will go to meet at the local Starbucks and “start a conversation.” Which latte do you like? Er no, not that kind of conversation. Quigley acknowledges he doesn’t have a thing to do with interstate pipelines–they’re approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). Other agencies (federal and state) oversee the pipelines once they are built. But Quigley thinks if he can get both sides–pipeliners and towns–together and try to at least get a dialogue going, perhaps something good will come from it. Not a bad idea as ideas go. One recommendation: don’t tell the nutters which Starbucks you’re meeting at…
The Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) has been working on revisions to oil and gas regulations, something called Chapter 78, since 2011. In 2012 the new Act 13 drilling law required the DEP to update Chapter 78 to reflect the new reality of shale drilling. Over the past three years, the DEP held nine public hearings and received some 24,000 public comments on the proposed changes (see 
Have you ever played Jenga? You know, the game where you stack blocks of wood in mini-skyscraper style and then each player must remove a block from a lower level and stack it on the top until somebody pulls a block out and the whole thing comes crashing down. That’s the comparison used to describe the state budget recently proposed by PA Gov. Tom Wolf in none other than the reliably liberal, Democrat-supporting, anti-drilling Allentown Morning Call. As the Morning Call points out, Wolf has built his Jenga (house of cards) budget on soaking drillers with a new severance tax. When that doesn’t happen, the whole budget comes tumbling down and no one will be to blame except Tom Wolf himself…
Using the same class warfare language all Democrats resort to when they want to justify their enormous appetite for taxing and spending, yesterday Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf introduced the highest-ever budget in PA and attempted to lay a huge theft, in the form of a so-called severance tax, on the Marcellus industry by saying, “We deserve to be fairly compensated for the use of our resources.” Just one problem Tom: IT’S NOT YOUR RESOURCES! The resources in question belong to private landowners and your proposal to steal their money, along with the money of the drillers who risk a lot of capital to drill, is abhorrent. The justification is that the money stolen will be given “to the children”–by which he means given to teachers’ unions who turned out the vote for him. The Wolf budget landed yesterday–with a thud–and it calls for $1 billion in taxes on the Marcellus industry. Wolf thinks he can get buy-in by ensuring $225 million of that amount will be kept local, like the old “impact fee.” That’s the payoff to try and get support for this Marcellus-killing budget. He plans to fork over the rest of it to Big Education as their reward for voting for him. Even the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette calls his budget “a miss” and “utter folly.” Can you believe that? It’s so bad even the anti-drilling editors at the Post-Gazette don’t like it…