gas Barons in Penn. throwing hits at the citizenry

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http://stateline.org/live/details/story?contentId=514986


In Pennsylvania, natural gas industry flexes its muscle

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Pennsylvania’s gas rush, however, is opening up a gusher of another kind, too. As the industry races to tap the Marcellus Shale and gain a foothold in a region that is attractively close to the voracious energy-consuming markets of New York and Philadelphia, it is pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into the campaign accounts of state lawmakers and candidates running for governor. It has hired one of the biggest names in Pennsylvania politics — former governor and U.S. Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge — at $900,000 a year to lobby for its interests, which include avoiding a severance tax, which every other major gas-producing state collects. And it has snatched three top aides from the Rendell administration, leading to speculation that Rendell himself would consider lobbying for the industry after leaving office, even though he has favored a modest severance tax.

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A powerful presence in Harrisburg

Pennsylvania voters this year will choose 228 legislators and a new governor, and the gas industry has been making its presence felt in the form of aggressive campaign contributions and lobbying. A May report by Common Cause of Pennsylvania, a government watchdog group, found more than $7 million in combined campaign donations and lobbying expenses from the gas industry to state politicians in recent years — including a tripling of lobbying expenses over just the last three years.

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“The argument that they can’t afford a tax is ludicrous,” says Jan Jarrett, chief executive of PennFuture, an environmental group that favors a severance tax as a way to pay for more conservation programs and oversight of the industry. Jarrett notes that many gas drillers in Pennsylvania don’t even pay the state’s 9.9 percent corporate income tax rate because they are structured as limited liability corporations or limited partnerships, allowing them to pay the 3.07 percent personal income tax instead.

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What is notable about the argument here, however, is the extent to which the industry has gotten local activists to fight for its cause — led by the property owners’ group that Schweighofer set up three years ago. The group, after all, is counting on not only the lease payments it has been promised by the industry but royalties that would eventually come from gas production itself.

Known as the Northern Wayne Property Owners Alliance, the group now represents more than 1,500 families who together own more than 100,000 acres of leased land — much of it the property of dairy farmers who have been hit hard by the recession. In e-mailed press releases, opinion pieces in local newspapers and in legal memos to the Delaware River Basin Commission, the group has fought every bit as hard for drilling as environmentalists have against it. The feeling locally is that the pro-drilling side will win.

The industry, at least, seems to think so. Already, an exploratory gas well has been constructed within sight of the Delaware River, and the road that leads to it through a dense forest has been improved in anticipation of increased truck traffic.
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greedy guts

another area of our country turning toxic

[Rex]

1. Tom Ridge? If this was small time money, there would be no chance

for this group. However, it is a large company with huge resources of money and will get whatever they want. Politicians are no different then the corporate suits that stuff money in their pockets 24/7 and call it 'lobbying'. And when something horrible happens? We will have a RWing idiot mouthpiece tell us it is the 'liberal medias fault'! Of course the M$M would light themselves on fire to help out big business.

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2. yes, Ridge is like Oliver North -- where ever they are trouble comes

to the less then rich