ITHACA – A Denver-based natural-gas company has sued the town of Dryden in central New York in an effort to strike down a recent zoning law prohibiting gas drilling there.

Thomas West, an Albany attorney for the drilling company, Anschutz Exploration, says the lawsuit was filed Friday, Sept. 16 in state court in Ithaca.

More than a dozen municipalities in New York have enacted natural gas-drilling bans or restrictions amid controversy over hydraulic fracturing. The state is moving closer to deciding whether to allow that method to tap vast gas reservoirs once thought to be unreachable in the multi-state Marcellus Shale formation.

Anschutz contends New York amended its environmental conservation law in 1981 giving the state power to regulate the oil-and-gas industry while confining local governments to regulations involving the industry's use of roads.