Land use planning bill gets referred to subcommittee
February 12, 2010 ·
If you own land outside an urban area and you want to mine its coal or drill for its natural gas, you may be subject to the county’s land use plan. Senate Bill 181 would change that.
The bill would basically take away counties’ ability to prevent the extraction of natural resources on privately-owned land.
The bill generated a lot of
discussion in the Senate Economic Development committee today. It’s opposed by
the West Virginia Environmental Council; lobbyist Leslee McCarty says it would remove
some major land use planning abilities from counties and cities.
“The way we feel about this
bill is it ties the hands of the local counties,” she said. “But if you do
this, that’s going to take extractive industries completely off the table. You
might want to put a buffer zone around something in a county; you won’t be able
to do that if you pass this bill. We would like to give the flexibility to the
counties.”
She cited examples from Monroe County, where there’s concern about Marcellus Shale
drilling. The county also has springs and bottled water companies; McCarty says
if this bill is passed, the county won’t have the power to mandate a buffer zone
to protect the spring water from drilling sites.
Bill Raney of the West
Virginia Coal Association defended the bill, though he stressed that it wasn’t
a “coal bill.” He says there are enough federal and state regulations
overseeing natural resources, without making companies jump through hoops at a
city or county level, too.
“Let these state regulations
and all these larger laws govern here, as opposed to having 55 different
approaches to the development of natural resources,” he said.
Committee chair Richard
Browning (D-Wyoming) formed a subcommittee to discuss the issue further, on the
request of Sen. Herb Snyder (D-Jefferson).
“As I said in committee, we
have to be very careful,” he said. “And there was no one here from the
Association of Counties or the County Commission’s Association to speak to this—and we’re talking
about their area of law, chapter 8A, where they can have planning and zoning
regulations at the local level.
“For the Legislature to reach
in and make a change like this, which might have broad-reaching effects...we
don’t know what the effects would be.”
The subcommittee’s report is
due on Friday.