Township loses battle against gas firms over drilling
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Taylorstown resident Thomas Westfall points to a pipeline buried under a strip of farmland.
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When Washington County's Blaine Township -- population 597 -- decided to take on the fossil fuel industry four years ago, its leaders called on a group that wants to nix corporate rights and shift power from Washington and Harrisburg to township boards and city councils.
That group, the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, accompanied Blaine officials on an odyssey that ended last year with twin smackdowns in court and at the polls. Undaunted, CELDF is now behind legislation, introduced on Sept. 7 in Pittsburgh City Council by Doug Shields, to ban Marcellus Shale gas drilling in the city.
The proposed ordinance CELDF is backing in Pittsburgh -- like bills it promoted in Blaine and elsewhere -- is more than a tweak to the municipal code. It's a challenge to the status quo, proposing the end of all "special privileges or powers" of corporations, and warning of "action to separate the municipality from the other levels of government" if local will is quashed by state or federal authorities.
Gas drilling in city neighborhoods would be but a symptom of a malady, said CELDF Projects Director Ben Price.
"The disease that needs to be cured," he said, "is the denial of rights to self-government on the local level."
What CELDF lacks, according to critics, is a track record of court victories.
CELDF's proposed Pittsburgh ordinance is "on the face of it, unconstitutional," said Councilman Patrick Dowd, who has written his own legislation to sharply restrict -- but not ban -- drilling in Pittsburgh. He said that if the city passes only a CELDF-inspired ordinance, and companies sue and overturn it, that "could expose us to [having] no law" as drilling spreads.
Blaine's 11.8 square miles of hilly farms and gamelands roll west from tiny Taylorstown, which resident Thomas Westfall calls "a very strange place."
"We don't have any police protection," said Mr. Westfall, a retired insurance agent who was a member of a commission that last year proposed home rule for the township.
"When we go to bed, we leave our houses unlocked ... Nobody gets too involved with their neighbors."
Neighbors fretted, though, in 2006, after Penn Ridge Coal revealed plans for mining there. Residents feared mine subsidence. Township supervisors reached out to CELDF, a 15-year-old nonprofit organization based in the Central Pennsylvania town of Chambersburg.
First Published October 3, 2010 12:19 am
