Down Goes Goliath!
Tompkins County Supreme Court Judge Philip Rumsey ruled Tuesday afternoon that the town’s zoning amendment is not preempted by state law. Dryden was sued in September by Denver-based Anschutz Exploration Corporation after passing an amendment to its zoning ordinance in August that clarified that Dryden’s zoning prohibits extractive industries.
Full Excerpt from Ithaca Journal
You can download the decision HERE.
Join Us!
Meetings are at 7:00 P.M. on the 1st and 3rd WEDNESDAYS of each month
at Dryden Town Hall.
Who are we? We are a group of Dryden citizens interested in raising public awareness of issues related to gas drilling, including land leasing details and the methods and risks involved with unconventional gas drilling (a.k.a. “hydrofracking” or “fracking”). We believe that all of our neighbors, whether their land is leased or not, value clean drinking water, clear air, and the recreational opportunities and quality of life in Dryden, NY.
What do we do? We educate ourselves and pass information along to our neighbors. We have organized a public forum and co-sponsored many educational public forums in Tompkins County on a range of topics related to unconventional gas drilling. We meet regularly with our Town Board members. We are working closely with the Board to explore and plan ordinances that may protect our tax-supported infrastructure and our right to the quiet enjoyment of our homes and property.
Why are we concerned? Accidents and contamination in areas of the US where unconventional drilling has been ongoing alert us to the threats we may face in NY. Accidents cause injury to people, livestock, plants, and wildlife. Contaminated drinking water and pollution of the land and air in the vicinity of gas wells are disrupting the lives of people from Dish, TX to Dimock, PA – people just like ourselves. Property values decline in gas drilling areas. Trucks weighing up to one hundred tons travel on rural roads, making thousands of trips per well site. Noise from generator engines, drills, and compressors fills the air 24/7. We do not want to live in an industrial zone, but that choice may not be ours to make unless we stand together and work toward a healthy future for Dryden.
Meetings are at 7:00 P.M. on the 1st and 3rd WEDNESDAYS of each month at the Dryden Town Hall.
SIGN OUR PETITION TO ASK THE TOWN BOARD TO BAN HYDRAULIC FRACTURING IN DRYDEN
You can sign on line!
Dryden residents MUST give us their ADDRESS in order to be counted as signers.
Find the petition here: www.petitiononline.com/nofrack
TO DONATE TO THE DRAC “KEEP THE BAN” FUND
TO DONATE TO THE DRAC “KEEP THE BAN” FUND
please make checks out to DRAC and send them to DRAC, PO Box 1094, Dryden, NY, 13053
New laws needed to protect Dryden
Guest Viewpoint on Ithaca Journal:
I have known Bruno Shickel for many years. He is a decent man. But he is wrong about some of the issues relevant to the town supervisor election.
He has written that the Town of Dryden does not need to revise its current zoning ordinance. According to New York state law, however, a town’s zoning ordinance must reflect its comprehensive plan.
The Town of Dryden, over the course of several different administrations (Republican and Democratic), worked on revising that plan and finished revisions in 2005; therefore, we are bound by law to update our zoning ordinance to reflect these revisions. The revision process for both the plan and the zoning ordinance were transparent and open to the the public.
The town planning board held three public meetings, in addition to a public hearing, to gather input on the plan. The planning board revised the plan according to public comments. The same process has been followed for the zoning ordinance. An overwhelming number of comments received by the planning board about the plan and the zoning ordinance have been positive. Dryden residents want the rural character of the town to be preserved.
With regard to gas drilling, as Marie Rae pointed out in these pages (Sept. 29), 7 percent of adult Dryden residents have signed gas leases, yet 100 percent of Dryden residents will be affected by impacts from drilling. Dryden simply is not suited for heavy industrial activity.
And the risks of contaminating our land and drinking water are grossly understated. The state Department of Environmental Conservation has reported that the Marcellus Shale is known to contain concentrations of uranium-238 and radium-226 at higher levels than surrounding rock formations.
Look at Pennsylvania’s experience with wastewater from hydrofracking. As of March 2011, 50 million gallons of hydrofracking wastewater had been unaccounted for. Some of the wastewater has been used for melting snow on roads, because of its high salt content. In West Virginia, wastewater used for dust suppression on dirt roads was found, after the fact, to contain radium at levels 700 times higher than is permitted in drinking water.
Others have written in the Ithaca Journal that Dryden’s ban on hydrofracking amounts to a taking of private property. Isn’t compulsory integration, which would force me to allow drilling on my property if 60 percent of property owners around me agree, a taking? I would rather have my elected officials decide how my land is used, rather than corporations. (Full Article)
Laquatra is vice chair of the Town of Dryden Planning Board.
Tompkins Weekly
The Dryden Resource Awareness Coalition (DRAC) has established a “Keep the Ban Fund” to collect donations in support of the Town of Dryden’s ban on heavy industrial activity in the town, including gas drilling. The Coloradobased oil and natural gas company Anschutz Exploration Corp. filed suit against the town on Sept. 16 in New York State Supreme Court. (Full Article Here: TompkinsWeekly111017 )
Tompkins Weekly
Bruno Schickel Hides Pro-Drilling Stance
The Bruno Schickel Flip-Flop:
June 15, 2011: “Regarding the prohibition [of fracking] through zoning… you’re moving in a direction that should scare the hell out of everybody in this room…It’s just wrong.”
October 14, 2011: “I think that’s something that I certainly wouldn’t take that position right now,” Schickel muses, when asked about a repeal. “I think that I would have to evaluate that.”
Protect Dryden – Vote for Sumner, Solomon and Lavine on November 8!
Here is a reason why you should not want fracking to come to our beautiful region. Look at the house in the foreground and imagine the family that lives there… (photo taken above the town of Avella, in Western Pennsylvania)
The future of Downtown Dryden?
Photos provided by www.marcellus-shale.us/
Aggressive upstate land grab sets up taxpayers for fall-out
Written by ELISABETH N. RADOW
Thursday, 15 September 2011 15:29
Stormy waters are brewing. It begins in upstate New York and could spill over into Westchester,
the rest of the state, and across the country.
The storm has its source in residential “fracking” – high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing
for natural gas under people’s homes. Gas drilling companies, which covet the underground gas
deposits in New York’s Marcellus Shale, have executed an aggressive land grab for gas leases
across the state’s Southern Tier from unsuspecting homeowners for the purpose of fracking.
Dangling promises of royalties that can go unfulfilled, the leasing brokers fail to inform
homeowners of the heavy industrial, uninsurable risks fracking entails. Based on decades of
conventional vertical drilling, homeowners signed preprinted lease agreements without
negotiation. Today, these homeowners are trapped indefinitely by leases that give strangers free
reign to take over their property while relinquishing basic home ownership benefits they once
took for granted.
A program on Tuesday, Oct. 4 at 7 p.m. in the new Mamaroneck Public Library on key issues
involving the DEC gas drilling environmental impacts will illuminate how fracking upstate could
impact taxpayers in Westchester. Continuing impacts from fracking on Westchester’s drinking
water will be discussed, too. The event is sponsored by the League of Women Voters of
Larchmont-Mamaroneck. Admission is free.
Since upstate homeowners did not know about the hazards of fracking when they signed the gas
leases, it did not occur to them to check their mortgage. Home mortgage loans prohibit heavy
industrial activity and hazardous materials on the property. Fracking brings both.
The mortgaged property needs to stay safe and uncontaminated because lenders sell 90 percent
of all home mortgage loans to the secondary mortgage market in exchange for funds to make
new home loans. Gas leases allow gas companies to truck in tankers with chemicals, transport
flammable gas and toxic waste, operate heavy equipment 24/7 and store gas underground, for
years, all in a person’s backyard.
Gas leases also create easements which continue after the gas company leaves, with no long-term
funds for upkeep. Gas drillers can sell the lease to anyone they choose without telling the
homeowner, so there’s no way for a family to control who comes onto their property to drill or
the quality of the work they perform. Homeowner’s insurance doesn’t cover the types of
industrial risks fracking brings and neither does the gas lease. Homeowners can get slammed
with risks for the dangerous activity they don’t even control.
Environmental scientist Ellen Harrison, for example, signed a gas lease in 2008 for her home in
Tompkins County, then discovered that she had jeopardized the safety of her home, her family’s
health, and the very property values that were the financial foundation of their existence. The
lease broker made no mention of fracking, which news reports blame for methane leaks,
chemical spills, blowouts, and more. The result is to send property values crashing. Since
homeowner’s insurance doesn’t cover casualties from fracking, Harrison would have to
successfully sue the gas company, a burden few homeowners can financially or mentally handle.
Plus, legal loopholes might let the gas company off the hook. Industrial-sized risks are so
expensive, even gas companies can’t get fully insured for them. Residential fracking brings heavy
industrial risks and the ripple effects could be of hurricane proportions. As fracking spreads
across 34 shale-rich states, the $6.7 trillion secondary mortgage market – which holds 90
percent of the nation’s home mortgage debt – could get left bearing the liability; American
taxpayers are next in line. Westchester is included.
Armed with new resolve in the wake of the last mortgage meltdown and common sense lending
guidelines, a growing number of banks won’t give new mortgage loans on homes with gas leases
because they don’t meet secondary mortgage market guidelines. This is so even before the
drilling begins. As a result, homeowners with a gas lease can be out of luck selling their homes
since the lease impacts stick with the property. Banks wouldn’t lend to their buyer either. The
impact of this perfect storm falls not only on homeowners and taxpayers but also affects the
banking, housing, insurance and secondary mortgage market interests and their investors. New
construction, the sign of economic recovery, won’t start where residential fracking goes on,
because construction loans require a property to be free of the very risks that gas drilling brings.
For all New Yorkers seeking the return of a healthy state economy, this shift of drilling risks from
the gas companies to the housing sector, homeowners and taxpayers begs for immediate
attention.
Elisabeth Radow, Esq. is an attorney at Cuddy & Feder LLP in White Plains. Radow chairs the
statewide League of Women Voters hydraulic fracturing committee. Radow’s in-depth article on
this topic appears as the cover story of the November/December issue of the New York State Bar
Association-NYSBA Journal Magazine.
