NORWICH – It’s getting ugly, but five years of non-stop tension between the two sides of the shale gas drilling debate was bound to boil over soon.
In an article in The New York Post yesterday, Deputy Senate Majority Leader Tom Libous said he had received repeated threats of bodily harm and that environmental activists had launched personal and political threats against local officials throughout the Marcellus Shale rich Southern Tier.
The threats come as Governor Andrew Cuomo appears to be stalling once again about whether or not to open New York for the business of horizontal, high water volume hydraulic fracturing. The state environmental conservation department has been in the process of setting extraction oversight since 2008 when former Gov. David Paterson first put the brakes on to assure its safety. In December 2010, after reports of frack water spills and contaminated well water surfaced in other states, Cuomo enacted a moratorium for even further study.
The latest release mark for the new regulations, Labor Day, has come and gone. The administration defends its time-taking saying the final decision will be based on the science and the facts, and that a decision would be made before Election Day. But a political football it’s become. Senator Libous, a pro-business Republican, has long been a proponent of safe drilling. He told the Post: “There have been repeated threats to me of bodily harm. There have been calls saying, ‘We know where you live,’ ‘We’ll come to your house’ – that kind of stuff.”
Libous’ spokesman Emmanuel Priest wrote in an e-mail last night that this latest chapter in the debate is real: “The Senator has received threats and they have been turned over to the appropriate authorities.”
It is not surprising since the Governor, in July, left the matter up to individual municipalities to decide. Since then, citizens have stood up to protect their drinking water supplies from the chemicals in frack solutions and deep formation water and land owners have staunchly defended their property rights. In some Chenango County towns, the police have been called in to maintain order at public meetings.
To date, more than 40 towns in New York have indicated that they favor safe shale gas development – including eight in Chenango County – but more than twice that number have enacted bans or moratoriums. People have packed the town and village halls in Plymouth all year trying to decide how to proceed and the Village of Oxford Planning Board is poised to recommend a moratorium next week.
