Currently making the rounds of Change.org: A petition by pro-drilling Southern Tier residents to allow Broome, Chenango, Chemung, Delaware, Steuben and Tioga Counties to secede from New York State and join Pennsylvania.
The signers, frustrated by New York State's long delay in issuing natural gas drilling regulations, are apparently mad as hell, and they're not gonna take it anymore:
The Southern Tier of New York State has been treated as a sacrifice zone by those other New Yorkers who would restrict us from developing our natural gas resources and revitalizing our economy. Those resources are ours and we are entitled to use them to save our farms, our families and our future. We, therefore, as residents of Broome, Chenango, Chemung, Delaware, Steuben and Tioga Counties, petition the legislature for the rights of Southern Tier counties to secede from the State of New York and join with the Northern Tier of Pennsylvania to be part of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
The petition doesn't appear particularly serious: It's attributed to "Greedy Landowners," and isn't directed at any particular government official or agency. So far, it has just 97 signatures. But Energy In Depth writer Nicole Jacobs is taking it at its word:
I don’t know if the move to join the Twin Tiers under Pennsylvania’s government is legal, whether it’s politically practical, whether it’s got much support or whether the whole thing is a tongue in cheek way to get Governor Cuomo’s attention. What I do know is that it reflects the extreme frustration, of some upstate New Yorkers, with the state’s lack of attention to their interests and needs.
Just a handful of residents from Catskills counties have signed the petition, including Gary Peake of the Sullivan County hamlet of Long Eddy, who writes:
New Yorkers have been denied their their property rights long enough, and must not give our constitutional rights.
It is evident that Pennsylvania is doing well with the drilling, as many New York residents have gone there to work for these companies, because there is NO work in New York. It is time New York State wakes up and passes drilling.
Southern Tier pro-drillers aren't the only Americans who'd like to decamp for the next state over -- or even the next country. In the Vermont ski town of Killington, town residents frustrated with Vermont's education funding system and environmental laws have voted twice to secede from Vermont and become a little island outpost of New Hampshire. And in Minnesota's Northwest Angle, a little blob of land cut off from the rest of the U.S. by the vast Lake of the Woods, residents petitioned in 1998 to join up with neighboring Canada because of overly-complicated fishing regulations.
