Editor,

This is an open letter to the Oxford Town Board.

Governor Cuomo and the DEC have created an enormous amount of unnecessary angst and uncertainty in small Southern Tier towns with the state’s vaguely worded announcements on how they plan on dealing with high-volume, horizontal, hydraulic fracturing in New York. The state says that the revised SGEIS will be delivered at summer’s end, but they haven’t made clear how they will proceed. Will towns receive a grace period to review the SGEIS? Will they follow up their present acknowledgement of home rule with iron-clad, unsupercedable state regulations? The fact is that we don’t know how this will go. The Oxford Town Board must do better than our state officials to show leadership and govern responsibly by putting in a moratorium on hydrofracking. Revokable at any time you are ready to lift it, a moratorium allows you to stay in control of the timeframe. There is no doubt that you will need time to review and absorb the SGEIS, a document that is purportedly 4,000+ pages long, and to take appropriate measures to protect and safeguard the town.

Enacting a moratorium is a demonstration of home rule. We know that the Town Board values home rule. In 2006 you enacted a moratorium to study the impacts of a NYRI proposal to put a high-voltage power line through the town; and in 2007, you amended the Oxford zoning ordinances to supercede DEC permitting, classifying gas drilling as a land use only permitted by special exception by the Oxford Zoning Board of Appeals. Your present course of inaction is an inappropriate response to Cuomo’s request for Southern Tier towns to weigh in on hydrofracking, and it is not in line with your past history of asserting home rule.

At the recent Town Board meeting, some attendees suggested that town leaders could have vested interests in hydrofracking that would impair their impartiality on the issue. One Town Board member took open offense at the questioning of the board members’ integrity. This is not a matter of discrediting board members whom we know have shown prudence and good judgment in the past. This is a matter of the appearance of impropriety.