New York

Communities and many environmental groups in New York State feel elated about recent court decisions upholding New York local municipalities zoning-out shale gas drilling and fracking under their constitutionally recognized home rule authority. We wish them well but…

We’re not so excited.

Communities in New York have received, from the governing elite (in this case, the courts), only a respite.  One (or more) of three possibilities is up and coming, and none of them will vindicate communities’ rights to exercise local self-governance:  1. Gas and oil corporate attorneys will appeal the case and the “higher” court will rule that the state’s laws preempt the exclusionary zoning, which amounts to a banning;  2. the corporate attorneys will sue under the “takings” clause of the 5th amendment for lost profits from gas resources and infrastructure, and the courts will make municipalities pay “damages” to frackers intent on legally damaging New York communities;  3. the legislature will strip the municipalities of the power to ban fracking  through land use and zoning ordinances via an amendment to state legislative preemptions on regulating oil and gas extraction, as has happened in Pennsylvania recently with HB 1950 (now Act 13), and is being attempted in Ohio, Idaho, and Colorado.

Then what will New York municipalities do?

Creating the communities we want to live in won’t wait for better state-wide legislation. There are no legislators wearing white hats ready to rescue us. It’s up to us to take on the serious commitment to municipal law-making based on community rights:  the right to protect our health, safety, and welfare; our right to a sustainable and just community; and our right to assert local authority for self-determination in the community where we live.  We either live in communities that can protect themselves from fracking by framing the problem as a denial of democracy and community rights, or we continue to lie to ourselves that it is a legal regulatory issue about drilling and how much harm we have to legally accept under existing law.

It is time for all of us to understand that we don’t have a fracking problem—we have a democracy problem:  It’s about the denial of local self-governance and the need to elevate the rights of communities over the behavior of corporations.

Wales is the only New York town where a rights-based ordinance was adopted, and a ruling against home rule exclusionary zoning authority will not affect it’s ban of fracking.  The communities below are playing by the rules, passing non-rights based ordinances, and are all vulnerable to an adverse ruling by the court and to corporate constitutional attacks. Read the unfolding stories listed below the map.

Interested?  Contact us at info@celdf.org