Pittsburgh Council to Consider Banning Corporations from Drilling for Natural Gas in the City

On September 7, 2010, Councilman Doug Shields introduced a Legal Defense Fund drafted ordinance that bans gas drilling within the city.  At the heart of “Pittsburgh’s Community Protection from Natural Gas Extraction Ordinance” is this statement of law: It shall be unlawful for any corporation to engage in the extraction of natural gas within the City of Pittsburgh. Also included in the ordinance is a local bill of rights that asserts legal protections for the right to water, the rights of natural communities; the right to local self-government, and the right of the people to enforce and protect these rights through their municipal government.

Doug Shields says, “Many people think that this is only about gas drilling. It’s not – it’s about our authority as a municipal community to say “no” to corporations that will cause damage to our community. It’s about our right to community, local self-government.” He is urging all municipalities in the Commonwealth to enact similar laws “to send a message to Harrisburg,” and he insists that a temporary moratorium “will not be an acceptable consolation prize for a failure of the State to recognize this local law and these fundamental rights.”

The ordinance is in response to energy corporations setting up shop in communities throughout Pennsylvania, with plans to drill for natural gas in the Marcellus Shale formation.  The frenzy of industrial gas extraction that once appeared to be confined to rural communities and state forest lands has taken residents of the city by surprise. Corporate “land men” have busily signed-up Pittsburgh property owners to contracts allowing wells to be erected on private property throughout the city. The prospect of paved-over green spaces, nights lit like airport runways, round-the-clock sounds of loud machinery, broken and pitted roads from the high volume truck traffic, and the threat of toxic trespass by a cocktail of patented chemicals and escaping methane into the ground water, has alarmed neighbors of lease-holders. They have begun to organize in opposition to the proposed drilling.

The energy corporations are using a gas extraction technique known as “fracking.” It has been cited as a threat to surface and ground water throughout Pennsylvania, and has been blamed for fatal explosions, the contamination of drinking water, local streams, the air and soil. Collateral damage includes lost property value, ingestion of toxins by livestock, drying up of mortgage loans for prospective home buyers, and threatened loss of organic certification for farmers in the affected communities.