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'Fracktivists' Lobby Youngstown Council for Ban
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio -- Three “fracktivists” spoke before City Council Wednesday evening in attempts to persuade council members to pass an ordinance banning hydraulic fracturing in Youngstown and in the Meander and Mill Creek watersheds.
“We the people are calling on the Youngstown City Council to protect the health, safety and welfare of this community,” said Julia Fuhrman Davis.
She, along with Lynn Anderson and Susie Beiersdorfer, urged the council members in three separate addresses to pass the Citizens’ Rights-Based Ordinance banning fracking, as the hydraulic fracturing process is called.
Beiersdorfer said similar bans have been adopted by municipalities in other areas such as the Delaware Watershed.
The call for a ban comes from not only a general fear that fracking will pollute the city’s drinking water and air, but also new knowledge that Everflow Eastern Partners, Canfield, is attempting to sell its leases for traditional wells around Mill Creek to a subsidiary of Chesapeake Exploration, the speakers said.
“Last summer, we recovered public records that were hidden from us for quite a while … that Chesapeake [Exploration] bought the deep drilling rights in the Utica shale on 26 slant drill wells that are around Mill Creek Park,” Anderson said.
Anderson worries about traditional wells permitted around Mill Creek for drilling into the Clinton sandstone becoming horizontal wells drilled into the Utica shale.
“We do not want fracking in our watershed,” Anderson said.
Anderson said she and others requested these records from the MetroParks in October and did not receive access to them until February. She said park commissioners wouldn’t talk to her or anyone else about the wells.
A representative with Mill Creek could not be reached because offices were closed by the time of the council meeting.
In a letter dated Feb. 21 to Everflow from Manchester, Bennett, Powers & Ullman, a Youngstown law firm representing Mill Creek MetroParks, attorney David Detec addresses a Feb. 13 letter from Everflow to Mill Creek requesting consent be given for the sale of leases to Chesapeake’s Ohio Buckeye Energy LLC.
“Please be advised that my clients have and do object to the assignment of the [l]eases to Chesapeake,” the letter reads. All three leases in question “clearly state that they are not assignable to any other oil and gas company” and can only be assigned by an amendment to the respective lease.
The letter states the MetroParks is “reviewing and analyzing” risks of drilling operations contained within the leases and that until an amendment is made to the leases, any sale is prohibited. The letter also questions the rights of the lease over any Utica and Marcellus shale plays beneath Mill Creek.
Anderson said the history of the leases and drilling rights around Mill Creek from 1969 through February can be accessed at the Main Branch of the Public Library of Youngstown and Mahoning County.
Copyright 2012 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.