Council Authorizes City to Pursue Drilling for Gas
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – City Council voted 5-2 Wednesday night to authorize the Board of Control to seek competitive proposals and enter into contracts that would lease land the city owns to oil and gas companies.
4th Ward Councilman Mike Ray and 5th Ward Councilman Paul Drennen voted no to the proposal upon its third reading.
The visitors gallery, nearly full and made up mostly of vocal opponents resigned to the measure passing, sat quietly and listened to 1st Ward Councilwoman Annie Gillam and 6th Ward Councilwoman Janet Tarpley, also chairwoman of the finance committee, respond to their criticisms and accusations.
Ray and Drennen said they want council to have more control over any requests for proposals and want council to have more say on the conditions the city should impose before allowing drilling. In the finance committee, Tarpley said the councilmen want the city legislature to exceed its role. “It’s our responsibility to stay in our lane," she said. "The Board [of Control] has been open [with council] and I’m concerned that we’re getting out of our area of expertise.”
Said 7th Ward Councilman John Swierz, “I believe the [Sammarone] administration is going to keep us informed” and would consult with council before entering into any contracts.
Afterward, both Gillam and Ray said they don’t know whether any land the city might offer sits atop shale plays that contain oil and gas a drilling company might find worth its while to extract.
Mayor Charles Sammarone, whose absence was noted and criticized during the public comment portion of the meeting, wants to direct any revenues the city might receive for demotion of abandoned houses throughout Youngstown.
During the meeting of the finance committee just before council met, proponents and opponents iterated and reiterated the arguments offered since the first reading of the bill.
There, Tarpley told Ray and Drennen, “We’re not shooting from the hip.” She will work with the Board of Control (which consists of the mayor, finance director and law director) to ensure residents are safe during any drilling that would occur and guard the purity of the water and air. “We’ll make sure people are safe today,” she declared, “and in the long run. … There might not be any oil anyhow.”
Leading off the public comment of the council meeting was Ray Beiersdorfer, a North Side resident and professor of geology at Youngstown State University. “We have a democracy problem, not a fracking problem,” he began after offering his academic credentials.
Beiersdorfer took an absent Sammarone to task for refusing the answer his questions at earlier hearings and again last night on whether hydraulic fracturing should be allowed to extract oil and gas on city-owned land. And he accused all members of council of not reading enough about the dangers fracking poses. “What have you done to educate yourselves about fracking?” was one of his more civil questions.
He answered his own question, saying that drilling inside city limits would result in “higher crime” and a host of other urban ills as well as “polluted air, polluted soil and polluted water.”
The gallery applauded as his time expired.
Clearly irritated, if not offended, by Beiersdorfer’s shrillness, Gillam asked how he had traveled to City Hall.
“I walked,” he answered.
“You didn’t come in a car?
“No.”
“Do you ever drive a car?”
The professor of geology allowed that he did, adding, “We need to use solar, tidal and wind power.”
Gillam agreed, asking, “What do we use in the meantime?”
Gillam also repeated that she has read extensively on fracking and the threats that opponents say it poses, especially in more densely populated areas. “I have a ton of papers at home dealing with the subject,” she informed Beiersdorfer, “and I’ve read every one!”
In an interview after the meeting, Beiersdorfer’s wife, Susie, an adjunct professor of geology at YSU, said that Youngstown “has [both] a democracy problem and a fracking problem.” She refused to admit defeat, calling last night’s vote a “setback” and saying that opponents will continue to monitor events and oppose efforts to drill.
Copyright 2012 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.