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Opinion- How House Bill 1950 Robs DCNR Of Its Ability To Protect, Preserve State's Public Forests And Parks
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By John Childe, Esq., Pennsylvania Environmental Defense Foundation House Bill 1950 (Ellis-R-Butler) would transfer funds from the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources’ Oil and Gas Lease Fund to support programs such as Growing Greener, the Hazardous Sites Cleanup Program, county conservation districts and the in-lieu of tax payments under the Forest Reserves Relief Program and the proposed new DEP programs, the Keystone Transit Fund and the Clean Transit.
While these programs are worthwhile, allocating money for their use from the Lease Fund is contrary to Article I Section 27 of Pennsylvania’s Constitution.
Article I Section 27 states as follows: The people have a right to clean air, pure water, and to the preservation of the natural scenic, historic and esthetic values of the environment. Pennsylvania’s public natural resources are the common property of all the people, including generations yet to come. As trustee of these resources, the Commonwealth shall conserve and maintain them for the benefit of all the people.
The money that is in the Oil and Gas Lease Fund is from leasing State Forest lands for drilling for natural gas that is owned by the State and from royalties from those leases. Over 700,000 acres of State Forest land will be significantly impacted as it is developed.
There is no wrong in leasing State lands. But the leasing of oil and gas on State lands is not meant to replace and destroy the use of those lands for the people of the Commonwealth. Article I Section 27 guarantees that these lands be conserved and maintained. The Oil and Gas Lease Fund is the legislatively created mechanism to insure that the leasing activities will pay for the loss, replacement and restoration of those leased lands.
The Governor’s Marcellus Shale Advisory Commission Report of July 22, 2011 clearly states the gravity of the threat that the current leasing program has on the constitutionally protected uses of State lands currently under lease. The land disturbance activities of the Marcellus Shale development and extraction process will result in numerous impacts, both immediate and long term, including fragmentation of our forest system. The impacts directly affect the people’s rights to the preservation of the “natural, scenic, historic and esthetic values of the environment”, and their right to have these public natural resources conserved and maintained for their benefit.
Specifically, the people have lost or will loose access to those State lands that are impacted by the gas development. These areas are “industrial zones” and include well pads, waste and water storage facilities, compression stations, metering stations, dewatering areas, access roads, and pipe lines carrying the gas. The use of hiking trails, hunting grounds, bird watching areas, and scenic vistas, and the esthetic enjoyment of unimpacted forests, will be hindered and in some cases, lost. The existence of rare and endangered species will also be threatened and in some cases, lost.
To protect the peoples’ rights, DCNR has immediate and long term funding needs, including the following:
a. DCNR needs to employ existing and evolving procedures to study the impacts, both positive and negative, on the State lands from the gas extraction process. DCNR needs to evaluate the effects of fragmentation on the loss of wildlife cover, impacts to forest interior species, the effects of creating new forest edges, the risk of predation, the expansion of invasive species. DCNR needs to evaluate the impact of increased impervious surface, including flooding, erosion and sedimentation. DCNR needs to mitigate these impacts and develop the means to restore and maintain those lands.
b. DCNR needs to buffer the impact of the gas extraction process, and need to provide sufficient replacement of wildlife habitat affected by the gas extraction process. DCNR needs to mitigate for the loss or disruption of hiking trails, hunting grounds and wild and scenic areas that are and will be impacted by the gas extraction operations.
c. In addition, our State parks and other State natural, wild and scenic areas are facing a potentially lethal challenge to their existence from the shale extraction process where the Commonwealth does not own the mineral rights within those parks and natural areas. As a result of the State Supreme Court decision in Belden & Blake Corp. v. DCNR, 600 Pa. 559, 969 A. 2d 528, (April 29, 2009), the Commonwealth does not have the authority to protect the integrity of those lands through protective agreements with the mineral rights owners. DCNR must be able to purchase the mineral rights beneath those parks and other natural, wild and scenic lands to protect and conserve them where developers of private leasing operations will not cooperate. The cost to do so will be hundreds of millions of dollars.
House Bill 1950 calls for amendments to the Oil and Gas Lease Fund Act that would permanently divert most if not all of the funds that go into the Oil and Gas lease Fund annually. DCNR needs has enormous needs for the Fund now. There is a back log of over a billion dollars of repairs and maintenance needs for our State Parks and Forests. The only source for those funds, and for all the funds the agency needs both now and in the future to deal with the impacts from the gas extraction process.
The programs identified in House Bill 1950 are all worthwhile. But the Oil and Gas lease Fund should not be the source for their funding. One reason why the legislature has proposed such use is to avoid having to require a significant impact fee on the gas industry. By our State Parks and Forest should not have to bear the brunt of such politics!
Call your Senators now to demand that they protect the Oil and Gas Fund for our State Parks and Forests, and vote against adopting the House Amendments.
John Childe, Esq., Pennsylvania Environmental Defense Foundation, can be contacted by sending email to: childeje@aol.com.
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12/5/2011 |
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