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.
PA Should Serve as Warning on Drilling
(Guest Viewpoint on the Ithaca Journal)
Our family farm is in Bradford County, Pa. Our farm was one of the first well sites chosen and is now one of hundreds, soon to be thousands.
When the folks in Pennsylvania first heard of the wells coming, they were excited. No one had ever experienced the drilling business, so there was nothing to fear. They had toiled their whole lives just to make ends meet, and maybe this was the road to a better life.
Then they came. Trucks by the hundreds, tankers, dump trucks, drilling rigs, fracking rigs. Five-acre drilling pads were bulldozed in the middle of farmers’ best fields, million-gallon ponds were installed, roads were built, woods and fields were trenched and bulldozed for tie lines. Drilling rigs went up at an unbelievable rate. From one spot on our farm, I counted eight rigs.
Then the generators started. You could hear them a half-mile away. Then the pumping stations — small, industrial sites with buildings and pipes sticking up out of the ground. They put one of these at the end of our little dirt road. Now the woods are gone and the dirt road is a main thoroughfare. One entire field is a pumping station. When I first saw this, I cried.
This industry is like a swarm of locusts, leaving destruction and a lasting impact on the environment. But it goes much deeper than this. It creates greed and pits neighbor against neighbor, even dividing families. Back home, all rental properties now house gas people, as the landlords raised the rents so high that longtime tenants were forced to move. Every parking area is lined with pipes and equipment associated with the gas business. Roads have been destroyed and are barely passable. Motorists are being forced off the road by a steady stream of big rigs and trucks.
People who are used to a few cars going by their house now have to endure 100 tractor trailers a day. I went up to our well site and counted 80 tankers lined up so closely that you couldn’t fit between them.
The gas companies do put on a good show. They have a nice booth at the fair. They buy bicycle helmets for the kids. They pay to have the walkways at the fairgrounds paved. They are always presenting a check for this and a check for that. Their pictures are always in the paper for doing good deeds. What a joke. That’s Bradford County.
The Finger Lakes area has been blessed with so much natural beauty — the gorges, the lakes, the vineyards. We have so much to protect. We want our fields to be green so our children can walk through them. We need our water to be clean, not only for ourselves but for our livestock and marine life.
If they start drilling, what’s going to happen to the water in our lakes? What’s going to happen if there is a drilling accident and people’s homes start filling up with methane gas? Don’t think it can happen? In northern Pennsylvania, it already has.
I urge you to protect this area, its residents, its natural beauty and our way of life from the ravages of the gas industry.
Ban fracking, switch to better alternatives
In my hometown of Dryden, we have no hydrofracking. We have sensibly banned it, but the battle didn’t end there.
Since then, Dryden has been constantly under attack for its strong stance, and now the firepower has intensified: A fracking company claims it will now file a lawsuit against Dryden to break the ban.
Small towns like ours just can’t deal with this level of resistance; we need the help of the state government. If New York state and Gov. Andrew Cuomo ban fracking, we can move on from this senseless and shortsighted squabble to meaningful change.
It’s time we focus our effort on real solutions: energy that won’t dry up over time, that won’t pollute our water or our air, that won’t transform our only planet’s atmosphere into an unrecognizable parody. It’s time to envision a clean future.
-Aiden Cortell
Dryden
New York Fracking Lawsuit Could Set Drilling Precedent
A lawsuit challenging a small town’s ban on natural-gas drilling could have implications throughout New York, where state officials are poised to approve a controversial drilling method known as fracking.
Anschutz Exploration Corporation filed suit on Friday against Dryden, a rural suburb of Ithaca with about 13,000 residents that last month amended its zoning laws to bar all gas drilling within its unincorporated borders.
New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation has recommended ending a year-long ban on drilling in New York, although a public comment period on the rules was extended this month following concerns that fracking contaminates underground wells and aquifers.
The Anschutz suit, which asks the state Supreme Court in Tompkins County to invalidate the amendment, is the first to test the legal implications of the state’s move.
Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, involves cracking open rocks deep underground with a blast of sand, water and chemicals to unleash natural gas and oil.
Anschutz, which owns more than 22,000 acres of land in Dryden, said New York’s Environmental Conservation Law bars local governments from any regulation of drilling.
Officials in Dryden and other towns considering their own restrictions on gas extraction say the law prohibits them only from regulating the drilling itself and not from saying where or whether it can take place.
Kevin Bernstein, an environmental lawyer in Syracuse, said the intent of the law was to create a consistent regulatory scheme throughout the state.
“For there to be a hodgepodge of attempted regulation by municipalities would run counter to that original purpose,” Bernstein said.
Dryden’s amendment said it was “not directed at the regulatory scheme for the operation of natural gas wells” but addresses land use and nuisance concerns as well as concerns over health and the environment.
The amendment is well within the town’s power, said Assemblywoman Barbara Lifton, an Ithaca Democrat who has been an outspoken opponent of the drilling industry. Read More…
