Capitol View
Lawmakers Push for Moratorium on State Forest Leasing
March 9th, 2010by Alex Roarty
A coalition of House lawmakers and environmental advocates said Tuesday that Governor Ed Rendell should abandon plans to lease more state forest land for drilling because the natural gas extraction could ravage the environment.
But an administration spokesman countered that the plan to make more state land available for drilling is one of the few politically viable ways to raise badly needed revenue as Pennsylvania grapples with a multi-billion revenue shortfall.
The governor proposes using $180 million from the leases to help fill next year’s budget, a plan similar to one used last year, when the state leased 32,000 acres to raise $60 million for the current fiscal year’s budget.
A better-than-expected return on the leases this year likely means the state won’t have to make as much land available next year as originally thought, but giving away even one more acre was an anathema to the lawmakers – including one Republican – who participated in Tuesday’s press conference.
“We simply can’t lease any more land out responsibly,” said Rep. Greg Vitali (D-Delaware), head of the so-called “Green Dog” caucus and press conference organizer.
He and other lawmakers centered their comments on concerns the leasing would short-sightedly damage one of Pennsylvania’s most precious resources, state forests, repeating mistakes that the state made decades ago that let industry damage wide swaths of state forest land.
Rep. Dave Levdansky (D-Allegheny), who has become one of the General Assembly’s most outspoken critics of leasing, pointed to an aerial photograph next to him that pictured part of the Allegheny State Forest. The photo showed a series of roads that cut through the trees that surrounded a drilling platform, which the lawmaker said made the wooded area look like a “checkerboard,” not a forest.
“I don’t want to see the Sproul state forest, Tiadaghton, Forbes, a number of state forests across the state, I don’t want to see them, five, 10, 15 years from now look exactly like the Allegheny natural forest,” Rep. Levdansky said. “But that’s the trail we’re headed down, that’s the pathway we are on.
“We gotta stop it, and we gotta stop it now,” he said.
The concerns are bipartisan, at least to one Republican lawmaker. Rep. Kate Harper (R-Montgomery) said leasing the land this and next year means the state has “given up” on managing the forests carefully and sustainably.
“We have said instead go ahead and do whatever you have to do to make the money that has to be made,” she said.
She also said the leases might be unconstitutional because the document gives the state’s residents a right to clean water, and the lawmaker said nobody knows if drilling will harm nearby water supplies.
Although Rep. Vitali has a bill, House Bill 2235, that would impose a five-year moratorium on leasing, Governor Rendell can unilaterally decide whether to allow or disallow any additional leasing, the lawmaker said. It’s why the press conference’s message focused on sending him, not the rest of the legislature, a message to stop the practice.
The Delaware County lawmaker concluded the press conference by asking what kind of legacy Governor Rendell wants to leave behind; if he wanted to be remembered as one of the state’s greatest conservationists.
But Rep. Vitali’s plea appears to have fallen on deaf ears unless he and his legislative colleagues can find another politically feasible way to raise revenue this year, according to Gary Tuma, the governor’s spokesman.
Other revenue enhancers proposed by the governor, such as increasing the personal income tax, have been discarded by the legislature, said the spokesman, who pointed out the leasing idea originally came from the legislature.
“Now if someone wants to come up with alternative revenue sources to replace money from leasing, he would listen to that,” Tuma said. “Absent alternative revenue sources, he doesn’t have plans to abandon additional leasing now.”
The leasing opponents said they would prefer to raise the revenue through a tax on the natural gas extraction. The governor has supported that idea by including it in his plan to create a reserve funding account this year, designed to cushion the blow when federal stimulus money expires. But the severance tax isn’t included in his proposal for next year’s budget, and Senate Republicans have said they don’t think now is the appropriate time to levy the tax on a still new industry in Pennsylvania.