NORWICH – The chairman of Chenango County’s Natural Gas Advisory Committee said Monday he would be happy if he never heard another word about gas.
Preston Supervisor Peter C. Flanagan made the comment after updating the county board on his presentation last week to members of a panel charged with determining how much it will cost for state and local governments to oversee development of thousands of natural gas wells, and how that money can be raised. He said state officials and panel members appeared confused when asked questions regarding the law on taxation and mineral rights specifications if Albany were to drill on state forest land.
“They have a steep learning curve up there,” Flanagan said, referring to Albany’s panel. “Hopefully, we can follow up with some concrete proposals of how they think this is going to affect us. But, I’m not extremely optimistic about this.”
There are between 75,000 and 94,000 acres of state land in Chenango County. The county’s advisory committee recently debated the pros and cons of how towns with heavy forestation would be affected if the state decided to lease its own land for drilling. Towns such as Pharsalia (which is half state land) and German could lose their school ad valorem tax if the state excluded them from their wells’ spacing units.
“If the state were to lease, they could drill all over near people’s homes with no leasing or royalty gains nor notification to local people. People would lose their own mineral rights,” said committee member and German Supervisor Richard Schlag.
Flanagan was joined by two other county officials in making the presentation: Smyrna’s James B. Bays who was appointed to the 18-member panel by Department of Environmental Conservation Commissioner Joe Martens and Chenango County Economic Development Consultant Steven Palmatier.
Palmatier said the panel has the “very complex” assignment of assigning the adequate resources and authority to all of the agencies and local governments that would be involved in overseeing and monitoring the hydraulic fracturing activities as outlined in the DEC’s draft Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement.
Flanagan acknowledged the county board and Chairman Richard B. Decker’s foresight in creating the advisory committee three years ago, saying, as Palmatier does often, that the county is far ahead of state officials when it comes to making sense of New York’s permitting, compulsory integration and taxing practices.
A second draft of the proposed SGEIS regs were released in July after a three-year long moratorium on shale drilling in New York. A comment period and four hearings, the first of which begins today in Dansville, is expected to be completed on Dec. 12, after which time the agency plans to make any necessary changes and is expected to release the final drilling rules sometime next year.
Green groups opposed to drilling are have gathered thousands of signatures on a petition to withdraw the DEC’s regs and plan protests today, and again at the Forum Theater in Binghamton tomorrow. They say hydraulic fracturing will contaminate water supplies with either leaked methane or chemicals added to the millions of gallons of fracturing water used to free natural gas from dense shale rock a mile underground.
An industry group claimed yesterday that the regulations as drafted would be so restrictive that drillers would avoid the state. Marcellus Shale prospectors are currently active in Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia.