NORWICH – It’s getting ugly, but five years of non-stop tension between the two sides of the shale gas drilling debate was bound to boil over soon.
In an article in The New York Post yesterday, Deputy Senate Majority Leader Tom Libous said he had received repeated threats of bodily harm and that environmental activists had launched personal and political threats against local officials throughout the Marcellus Shale rich Southern Tier.
The threats come as Governor Andrew Cuomo appears to be stalling once again about whether or not to open New York for the business of horizontal, high water volume hydraulic fracturing. The state environmental conservation department has been in the process of setting extraction oversight since 2008 when former Gov. David Paterson first put the brakes on to assure its safety. In December 2010, after reports of frack water spills and contaminated well water surfaced in other states, Cuomo enacted a moratorium for even further study.
The latest release mark for the new regulations, Labor Day, has come and gone. The administration defends its time-taking saying the final decision will be based on the science and the facts, and that a decision would be made before Election Day. But a political football it’s become. Senator Libous, a pro-business Republican, has long been a proponent of safe drilling. He told the Post: “There have been repeated threats to me of bodily harm. There have been calls saying, ‘We know where you live,’ ‘We’ll come to your house’ – that kind of stuff.”
Libous’ spokesman Emmanuel Priest wrote in an e-mail last night that this latest chapter in the debate is real: “The Senator has received threats and they have been turned over to the appropriate authorities.”
It is not surprising since the Governor, in July, left the matter up to individual municipalities to decide. Since then, citizens have stood up to protect their drinking water supplies from the chemicals in frack solutions and deep formation water and land owners have staunchly defended their property rights. In some Chenango County towns, the police have been called in to maintain order at public meetings.
To date, more than 40 towns in New York have indicated that they favor safe shale gas development – including eight in Chenango County – but more than twice that number have enacted bans or moratoriums. People have packed the town and village halls in Plymouth all year trying to decide how to proceed and the Village of Oxford Planning Board is poised to recommend a moratorium next week.
“I feel sorry for town boards who are being pushed from both sides when it’s a state decision,” said Chenango County’s Natural Gas Industry Consultant, Steven Palmatier.
Whether or not New York and Chenango County gets to participate in the nation’s coming energy boon is anybody’s guess. It’s a high stakes decision not only politically, but financially if it takes off. Broome, Chenango, Chemung, Delaware and Tioga counties will be the first in New York to be developed. If nearby Bradford County, Pa.’s rewards can be compared, each can anticipate $6 to $9 million from drillers’ fees alone, not to mention the fertilizer, plastics, municipal power businesses and jobs that are certain to follow. Reports from Pennsylvania show fees on gas drillers raised more than $200 million last year.
Palmatier is already in contact with a half dozen companies that are trying to figure out where they might fit into Chenango’s natural gas business picture. But the economic development consultant said he’s “absolutely baffled” by so much of what he is hearing from Albany. DEC regulators are now considering a study of the potential public health effects of hydraulic fracturing as part of its review.
Palmatier himself, per a request by a member of the now defunct DEC Commissioner Joe Martens’s Hydraulic Fracturing Advisory Panel, completed a 4,550 page well pad safety study earlier this year. He said he coordinated with many Chenango County public health and safety officials to acquire the data and a cost analysis.
At this point, however, he said he can’t get anyone to answer his questions at the DEC. He’s not sure what happened to his work, either. “I’m not sure what the governor is looking at. We are doing some things (studies) over and over again, repeat and repeat,” he said.
Dan Fitzsimmons, president of the Joint Landowners Coalition of New York, Inc., which includes thousands of acres in Chenango County, said waiting through the election season would be “a death sentence for this potential lifeboat for our state.”
A recent Quinnipiac University poll of New York State voters says Republicans support drilling 72 -16 percent while Democrats are opposed 54 - 31 percent and independent voters are divided with 46 percent in favor and 43 percent opposed. Upstate voters support drilling 48-40 percent, up from 43-44 percent in July and the strongest support since a 51-39 percent result when the question was first asked of upstate voters a year ago.
Five years ago next Wednesday, Chenango County formed a natural gas advisory committee to monitor Norse Energy’s low-volume hydraulic fracturing in the sandstone formations under the Town of Smyrna. Since then, the committee and Chenango County Planning & Development have been tracking and mapping natural gas exploration activities, holding Norse Energy accountable to DEC regulations and attempting to educate the community about municipal laws designed to protect roads and the environment. Today, a natural gas gathering pipeline system extends from the northern border of the county to the Town of Preston transporting natural gas to the compressor stations in the towns of Plymouth and Lebanon (Madison Co.) where it enters the major pipelines for distribution throughout the state.