I wanted to point out that the two links to the CDT articles on the blowout in Clearfield county are dead ends.

I also wished you had jumped on the republican voting records and how the senate has stalled all the bills. Great Job otherwise

Property tax on natural gas a simple matter of fairness
Daniel Fisher

There has been much discussion about a natural gas tax being reinstated in Pennsylvania. This is not a new tax. As superintendent of the Bald Eagle Area School District, a rural school district that has the lowest tax base in Centre County, here are the facts surrounding that debate as they apply to the students and taxpayers in our district.
While no one likes to pay taxes, Bald Eagle Area must rely on tax monies to educate our children. Taxation is the method Pennsylvania has always used to fund public education, and we receive about 35 percent of our education funding from property taxes, which are paid by the businesses and community members within our district.
For more than 100 years prior to 2002, the natural gas industry in Pennsylvania also paid property taxes to the schools to help pay for the education of our children. For example, in 2001, Bald Eagle Area received about $65,000 in property taxes paid by natural gas companies operating shallow gas wells in our district.
But in 2002, due to a state Supreme Court decision, all the natural gas companies operating in Pennsylvania suddenly no longer needed to pay property taxes, even though all of the natural gas producers in the states surrounding Pennsylvania — and in the major producing states such as Texas and Louisiana — continued to be taxed.
This year, if we were still collecting property taxes on the long-standing shallow gas wells in our school district, Bald Eagle Area would receive about an additional $1 million in property tax revenue per year. (This revenue would be from taxation of the shallow wells, not from the Marcellus Shale play; the property tax would be paid by the gas industry, not by the person who owns the property where the wells were being drilled.)
Consequently, other industries and community members in the Bald Eagle Area School District are paying more property taxes to fund our children’s education because the natural gas companies drilling within our school district boundaries are enjoying a property tax-free ride.
There is now movement, and even a budget deal commitment, in Harrisburg to institute a severance tax, not a property tax, on the natural gas companies operating in Pennsylvania. If a severance tax is passed by Harrisburg, the money collected from these natural gas wells will, in all probability, be distributed throughout the commonwealth.
If a property tax is passed, the money collected will stay at the local level — in the school districts, counties, boroughs or townships where the natural gas is actually extracted. That seems fair to me. After all, since education is funded with local property taxes, why would we ever remove a class of local commercial property from the tax rolls?
There also is discussion about excluding the shallow-type gas wells from taxation. These are the same wells that I mentioned previously, that, if they were currently taxed, would provide our small school district with about an additional $1 million per year. The folks in Harrisburg may say those shallow wells are too small to matter, but they certainly would matter to us.
Since long before the Marcellus play became the buzzword, I have been campaigning for the reinstatement of this natural gas property tax. To me, the reinstatement of a property tax on all natural gas production in Pennsylvania is a simple matter of fairness to Bald Eagle Area students, taxpayers and the businesses operating within our school district that pay property taxes.
Our state legislature has sanctified the natural gas industry by allowing its operators to have a property tax-free status over the past eight years, a status that should be reserved for churches and other religious institutions.
This legalized avoidance of property tax by the natural gas industry is costing millions of lost dollars in revenue to the Bald Eagle Area School District and 200 other Pennsylvania rural school districts, 42 counties and hundreds of local municipalities. In order to continue to provide a good-quality education for our children, the Bald Eagle Area School District must recoup this revenue shortfall, unfortunately, from other local businesses and residents.

http://www.centredaily.com/2010/07/28/2117920/property-tax-on-natural-gas-a.html#ixzz12clxXHkt

I end with a few questions, Michael. While I support your approach on contemporary policy toward natural gas drilling, what I have not heard about and am dying to flesh out is the post-exploitation approach. Sometime down the road we have to say to ourselves: “So the companies have extracted all exploitable natural gas pockets–now what?” Do you support a potential natural gas tax that might take care of the inevitable issues of post-drilling land restoration and economic vacuums, i.e. by augmenting the “rainy day” funds of local communities or by funneling money to organizations and programs that are competent to address those issues? Or, more to the point, do you support the current legislation that is working its way through the Pennsylvania Congress? Do you think it’s enough? Maybe there are more comprehensive changes we can make federally to help prevent this type of situation in other parts of the country?

Thanks a lot, Michael. Take care.

Is he afraid to face the issues that we need addressed? Incompetent? Simply uncaring? Perhaps he is counting on re-election through avoidance.