A crowd of several hundred protesters packed the lawn of Courthouse Square in Delhi yesterday to protest the Delaware County Board of Supervisors, which has been supportive of hydraulic fracturing, a form of gas drilling also known as fracking.
One by one, speakers took the microphone under the tree on the courthouse lawn before a forest of "No Drill No Spill" and "No Frack" signs.
"I'm so angry!" said Mary Handler, who came to the protest from Damascus, Pennsylvania, where she lives along the Delaware River. "I have pre-traumatic stress disorder. I feel homeless already."
Steve Dungan, of Walton, said that gas drilling would turn Delaware County into an "industrial wasteland." Gene Warner, of Franklin, described the gas companies as "poisoners" who have the right to invade private property in the region.
The protest, which has been planned for weeks to coincide with a Board of Supervisors meeting scheduled for today, attracted about 340 people, according to Bovina resident Heidi Gogins, who helped with the planning.
However, the Board meeting itself didn't happen. Instead, it was abruptly canceled yesterday afternoon.
In an interview, Meredith Supervisor Keitha Capouya, who was the lone dissenting vote when the Board voted to support drilling in 2009, said that the official reason given for the cancellation was that there were only four resolutions pending before the Board. That, she said, is far fewer than normal.
But, Capouya said, the protesters could be forgiven for thinking that the supervisors were trying to avoid them.
"I just think it was probably not the best choice," she said of the decision to cancel the meeting.
The canceled meeting would have been the last one of the year to be held in the evening. For the rest of 2010, Board meetings will be held at 1pm, an hour that is inconvenient for members of the public who work 9-to-5 jobs. The next meeting will held on September 22 at 1pm.
Capouya was one of just three county supervisors who attended the protest, she said. The other two were Bruce Dolph, of Walton, and Peter Bracci, of Delhi.
Bracci had one of the most dramatic moments of the afternoon when he took the microphone and addressed the somewhat hostile crowd:
"Let me thank you for allowing us, the members of the Board, to be in your presence," Bracci said, to laughter. "I'm expecting safe passage."
In response to a question from the audience, Bracci said, "Well, if you want to know my honest opinion, I don't think you'll ever see fracturing in the watershed area."
In response, some people in the crowd cheered. Simultaneously, others began to yell, "That's not good enough!"
Another audience member asked Bracci who "contributed to his campaign."
"Nobody," he answered. "We're a small town -- we don't have campaigns like that."
Over the past two years, the Delaware County Board of Supervisors has earned a reputation for being pro-drilling. In the fall of 2008, the Board passed a resolution opposing increased regulation of gas drilling in the New York City watershed. (You can read that resolution on page 15 of the minutes of the meeting, posted at the bottom of this article.) A month later, the Board invited several representatives of the gas industry to give it a presentation on the virtues of gas drilling.
In 2009, the Board passed another resolution, this one supporting hydraulic fracturing in Delaware County pending the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation's review.
At the protest today, one of the organizers, Gene Marner, said that the Board has refused to give anti-drilling groups the same forum it has given pro-drilling representatives:
"Several months ago, my wife, Carol Marner, got a petition up and it was signed by nearly 400 residents of Delaware County asking the Board of Supervisors to invite people who are opposed -- knowledgeable, informed, scientifically-qualified people -- who are opposed to drilling to make the opposite case. We haven't heard from them. We never got a response to that. And so that's part of the reason why we're here today, to try to make that happen."
Delaware County Board of Supervisors meeting, October 8, 2008
