The EPA might not be able to get its act together to organize a public meeting on hydrofracking, but the New York City Council hosted one last night at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. On hand: A few hundred concerned citizens, mostly anti-drilling, and apparently not too many reporters.
News coverage was sparse, but we found an account of the meeting on www.heatingoil.com, a blog about the heating industry that has some surprisingly good original reporting. Josh Garrett reports:
From the opening moments of the meeting, it was clear that the majority of city politicians and bureaucrats, as well as the approximately 200 citizens in attendance, were there to oppose the use of hydrofracking in New York City’s watershed. Speaker Quinn kicked off the meeting with kudos for her fellow council members and state lawmakers for their willingness to enact moratoriums on hydrofracking. Quinn stated that the purpose of the meeting was to collect testimony from New York City residents (who would be “directly affected” by hydrofracking) that would be submitted to the EPA, as the agency had not planned a hearing in the city as part of their nationwide hydrofracking study.
But not everybody came with an anti-drilling agenda. Windham landowner Ray Olson made the 150-mile trip to NYC to deliver some fighting words:
Clearly sensing that he was in unfriendly territory, Olson took a combative tone, beginning with a correction of “misstatements” made by council members. “There are a million acres in the watershed,” he stated defiantly, “900,000 of those are privately owned. It is not your watershed, and it is certainly not your water. It is ours.” Olson went on to describe the financial compensation offered by gas companies to landowners such as himself, and said that he stood to win initial payments (through land leasing and gas royalties) that total $5 million. “We will get our money one way or another,” he said, arguing that the city would have to pay watershed landowners for the rights to the water beneath their land—though that premise is highly questionable, as upstate residents are not currently compensated for the water used by New York City.
A note on that: Technically, upstate residents are being compensated for the many demands NYC makes on landowners in the watershed region, via money funnelled through the Catskill Watershed Corporation and the Watershed Agricultural Council, and used mostly for funding economic development and environmental conservation projects. Whether it's enough, and whether it's fairly distributed, are open questions -- but the millions NYC set aside in 1997 under a landmark deal with Catskills watershed towns aren't chump change.
Meanwhile, more and more eyes across the nation are watching the Marcellus to see what will happen next. USA Today has a recent story on Sullivan County, in which the usual suspects got the chance to give 3.3 million readers a piece of their minds. Here's the pro:
To Noel van Swol, a retired teacher who owns 400 acres of timberland, gas leasing is an economic lifeline and the controversy is "class warfare" between local residents struggling to make a living and wealthy weekenders who care only about preserving their scenic views.
Drilling "is the only thing that can save Upstate New York," says van Swol, who with Graby is part of a landowners group formed to negotiate gas leases — as yet unsigned. Tax revenue from natural gas will be too much for the cash-strapped state to resist, he says. "They're going to have to do this."
And the con:
A few miles up the road, Pete and Alice Diehl are equally determined that gas drilling comes nowhere near their dairy farm. They believe drilling for shale gas poses too much risk to their well water, the nearby trout stream and the area water supply that gives New York City, two hours away, such pure water it is one of the few city systems that does not have to be filtered.
"If you don't have your water, you don't have anything," Pete Diehl says.
