PLYMOUTH – Towns may use local laws to protect against heavy industrial activities that impact land, such as natural gas drilling, according to a lawyer who made a presentation Monday night to the Plymouth Town Board.

David Slottje, an executive director and senior attorney at Community Environmental Defense Council, said a town’s police powers would extend to land use matters under municipal home rule law, and existing New York mining statute does not take away that local authority.

He also suggested that towns enact moratoriums before the state’s environmental conservation regulators complete their revision of the rules for permitting horizontal shale gas drilling. Doing so first would lessen the financial impact of any potential lawsuits brought by companies and or landowners who challenge local law, he said.

The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation is currently sifting through tens of thousands of comments on a draft Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement. The NYSDEC stopped permitting shale wells in 2008 amidst reports of water contamination in neighboring Pennsylvania and other states in the country where high water volume hydraulic fracturing has been and remains ongoing.

The legal opinion is counter to one offered to those attending a Chenango County Natural Gas Advisory Committee meeting in Norwich last summer. Attempts by government officials to zone the natural gas industry, beyond creating road use ordinances and determining real property taxes, is superseded by New York State Oil, Gas, and Solution Mining Law, said a former director of the DEC’s mineral resources division.

Gregory H. Sovas, president of XRM, LLC, and the primary author of amendments that were made to the state law, was invited to present before the gas committee in the wake of drilling bans passed in neighboring Tompkins and Otsego counties. Lawsuits brought in both the Town of Dryden, by an energy firm, and in Middlefield, by landowners, are currently underway.

About 90 people from all over the region attended the Plymouth Town Board meeting to hear Slottje’s presentation Monday. Supervisor Jerry Kreiner permitted members of the audience to speak for five minutes each during a public comment period. Unlike other town and county board meetings where security was called after members of the public expressed both pro and con arguments on the subject of drilling heatedly and out-of-turn, the tenor at the Plymouth Fire Station was controlled.

Most of the 28 people who addressed the board called on town councilmen to pass a moratorium on high water hydraulic fracturing in Plymouth.

“We hear all of the time that it’s un-American to tell people to do with their property. That’s not true. Ownership of land from the beginning carries a responsibility that it can’t hurt property that will affect neighbors down the street,” said Slottje.

“The general welfare of the public is superior in importance to the financial profits of the people.”

During a power point presentation, the attorney cited legal cases to support his opinion. Plymouth Town Councilman Drew Piaschyk pointed to other legal interpretations of the state’s mineral mining law, specifically to Solvas’ argument.