County board to take stance on ‘forest focus’ designation
NORWICH – Chenango County lawmakers could take a stance today against a state act that would exempt a majority of the land in the county from gas-drilling on behalf of birds and their habitats.
The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation’s nearly 900-page well permitting regulations would deem Chenango County a forest focus and grassland designation. What this means is that the county, which estimated to be 70 percent forest (15 percent of which is state land), would be subject to as much as a three-year study by a professional biologist on the breeding success of birds before being permitted for natural gas production, according to the DEC’s draft rules due out later this year.
A resolution up for adoption today was forwarded from the Natural Gas Advisory Committee. Members of the ad-hoc committee have opposed the possible designation since it was first discovered late last fall in a previously revised version of the Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement. Backed by a report from New York Farm Bureaus representing Tioga, Chemung, Steuben, Schuyler and Tompkins counties, the ad-hoc committee views the DEC’s designation as “mostly irrelevant, misguided, not based on scientific fact and is overly restrictive on the farming community.”
Committee Chairman Peter C. Flanagan said the amount of acreage in Chenango County has increased over the past 60 years as more farms have faced economic hardship and were forced to let their acreage go back to the wild.
The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation’s nearly 900-page well permitting regulations would deem Chenango County a forest focus and grassland designation. What this means is that the county, which estimated to be 70 percent forest (15 percent of which is state land), would be subject to as much as a three-year study by a professional biologist on the breeding success of birds before being permitted for natural gas production, according to the DEC’s draft rules due out later this year.
A resolution up for adoption today was forwarded from the Natural Gas Advisory Committee. Members of the ad-hoc committee have opposed the possible designation since it was first discovered late last fall in a previously revised version of the Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement. Backed by a report from New York Farm Bureaus representing Tioga, Chemung, Steuben, Schuyler and Tompkins counties, the ad-hoc committee views the DEC’s designation as “mostly irrelevant, misguided, not based on scientific fact and is overly restrictive on the farming community.”
Committee Chairman Peter C. Flanagan said the amount of acreage in Chenango County has increased over the past 60 years as more farms have faced economic hardship and were forced to let their acreage go back to the wild.
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