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Fracking Activists Challenge Mill Creek Park Board
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – About 15 activists and residents concerned over the prospect of hydraulic fracturing in Mill Creek Park showed up at Birch Hill Cabin Tuesday evening at what they thought was an open meeting of the park board.
Instead, they were turned away after being informed that the meeting called was for an executive session to discuss personnel matters, not a regular public meeting.
Nevertheless, several of the activists took the opportunity during a summer downpour to question park commissioner Bob Durick as to the nature of the meeting and why the board has repeatedly refused to proffer any information about the possibility of large energy companies drilling on park land.
"You don't answer any of our questions," said Chris Khumprakob, a resident of a Mill Creek Park neighborhood on the city's West Side. "You've said nothing."
"There's nothing to talk about," Durick replied. The next board meeting scheduled is Monday at the Mill Creek MetroParks annex in Canfield, he said, and the board wasn't planning any action after the executive session concluded and therefore couldn't comment on matters he wasn't familiar with.
Durick said the confusion came from a notice published in The Vindicator, which didn’t specify that last night's meeting would be an executive session, not an open meeting. Under Ohio law, public boards can call an executive session and meet in private to discuss matters such as property acquisitions, personnel issues or litigation.
Activist Lynn Anderson, who has helped lead a public campaign for a citizen's rights ban on hydraulic fracturing in the city -- and has turned up reams of public records on the matter in relation to the park -- said the board has dragged their feet and refused to come clean about their intentions.
Anderson said lately she's been kept awake at night because of what she believes is loud machinery working nearby her house in the Lake Glacier neighborhood. "Are they taking water out of the lake? I don't know," she said.
Durick said he didn't know what the source of the noise could be, and couldn't comment.
Anderson said public records show that decades-old leases covering the shallow rights to Clinton wells in the park are now assigned to subsidies or partners of Chesapeake Energy, and that the park's executive director, Clark Johnson, has been negotiating with these companies for months. Everflow Eastern, a Canfield company, originally owned the leases.
More disturbing, she said, is that Chesapeake has hired a company that specializes in pre-drilling groundwater testing on the Mill Creek Park wetland preserve near Western Reserve Road in Canfield.
Anderson and the others are worried that big energy companies will introduce hydraulic fracturing to explore the deeper Utica shale. The process involves injecting millions of gallons of water, sand and a chemical concoction under high pressure into the well after its drilled. The method is used to fracture tightly packed shale formations and release natural gas and oil.
Anderson said some of these chemicals are known carcinogens, and she fears contamination of nearby water supplies and aquifers.
Since October 2011, Anderson said she's petitioned for records from the park and finally received a response in February. Some of those records are now on file in the Public Library of Youngstown and Mahoning County's Main Branch downtown, she noted.
"I know I've opened up a can of worms," Anderson said. "All I want them to do is stop this."
Copyright 2012 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.