Limits of local control

Roads, noise, pollution and gas-drilling safety discussed

By FRITZ MAYER

LIBERTY, NY — If you’re a property owner who decides not to sign a lease with a gas drilling company, no one can force you to do so. But if 60 percent of the property owners of the acreage surrounding your property sign drilling leases, the gas company that holds the leases can apply to the New York Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) for drilling rights to your land. And, under current law, the gas company will be able to take gas from under your property via horizontal drilling. You will be compensated for the gas, but you won’t be able to stop it. That’s according to a Binghamton lawyer, Robert Wedlake, who has negotiated gas drilling leases in Broome and Delaware counties.

Wedlake spoke at a forum on gas drilling at Liberty High School on June 27. He said the laws of New York State are geared toward encouraging the production of gas here.

Earlier in the day at a meeting of elected town officials, Wedlake said that when drilling begins at a well site, the noisy work occurs with the aid of bright lights, which are lit 24 hours a day, seven days a week for up to six weeks. And because of the state’s environmental conservation law, there is nothing town officials can do to prevent it. Robert Blaise, a councilman from Bethel, said a town board could pass a law restricting hours of operation and a court could decide who was right.

Wedlake said, “And you’ll lose.”

Several speakers at the evening forum agreed that one area where town officials do have some control is in mitigating damage to local roads from the hundreds of trucks that will be needed to service the well-drilling operations. Towns are permitted to recover costs for damage to the roads, which, according to Sullivan County planning commissioner Bill Pammer, will be extensive.

Under current rules, however, the amount that towns can require drillers to be bonded to mitigate possible road damage is not nearly enough to cover the repairs that will be needed in the wake of so much truck traffic. Pammer said he is working on methods that towns can use to calculate the actual cost of repairing the damage the drilling-related rigs will create, with the intent that the DEC will work with towns to ensure that gas companies will be made to post reasonable road bonds.

The forum, which was sponsored by the Catskill Mountainkeeper and the Sullivan County Division of Planning and Environmental Management, also brought a lot of talk about the unanticipated impacts that drilling will bring.

Peggy Utesch, of Rilfe, CO, said that when gas-drilling operations exploded near her home, the influx of gas workers drove rental-housing prices sky high because the relatively well-paid gas workers needed places to stay. As a result, lower-skilled workers could no longer afford to live in the area, and several stores that had been scheduled to open at a shopping mall in the region could not find employees and the stores could not open.

She also said the drilling and extraction lead to very high concentrations of ozone, creating an air quality that is more polluted than that of Los Angeles and other big cities.

Utesch also told of contaminated wells, drilling-related accidents that the local hospital was ill equipped to deal with, door-to door evacuations caused by well fires and over-taxed water and school systems. She urged residents to have baseline measurements of well water established to be used to recover damages should well contamination occur.

She also said that as a result of all the gas drilling impacts in Rilfe, hunting and fishing, which had been important economic activities, were forced out of the area.

In the meantime, Sullivan County towns continue to try to slow down the process to allow time to study the matter. On June 25, the Town of Tusten board voted unanimously to follow the towns of Highland and Cochecton in seeking a six-month moratorium on gas drilling.