Jul 30, 2013 3 min read

ZANESVILLE, Ohio (AP) – A federal agency plans to auction off mineral rights in most of Blue Rock State Forest in eastern Ohio to allow shale gas drilling, a decision state resource officials say was made without their input.

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management wants to open more than 4,500 acres of the state forest in Muskingum County to hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, the Columbus Dispatch reported Tuesday.

Oil and gas companies would be allowed to submit bids at a Dec. 12 public sale.

The federal government owns the mineral rights underneath the state-owned land, and Robert Gillcash, a Bureau of Land Management spokesman, said the Ohio Department of Natural Resources gave its consent to nominate the parcels for lease in what he said is standard procedure.

Natural Resources Department spokeswoman Bethany McCorkle said in an email to the newspaper the state owns only a minority share in the forest’s mineral rights and so BLM has sole jurisdiction on how they are used. The state will be required to give the owner of the mineral rights “reasonable access” to the land for drilling, she said Tuesday.

Environmental-advocacy groups, including the Buckeye Forest Council, wondered why neither federal nor state officials took any additional steps to inform the public.

Council attorney Nathan Johnson noted the bureau’s proposal to sell oil and gas leases on state-owned lands with federally owned minerals was posted online in March with a 30-day comment period.

“Unfortunately, it seems nobody in the state of Ohio got the message,” he said.

The newspaper reported the online proposal doesn’t name Blue Rock outright on primary documentation, only in secondary documents accessed through the website.

Gillcash said the bureau followed rules for public notification and scheduled the auction only after the Ohio Department of Natural Resources consented.

But McCorkle said the state allowed the federal agency onto the land last fall to conduct an environmental assessment but had heard nothing more.

“The Bureau of Land Management has not shared their environmental assessment with us, nor did they notify us of their public comment period,” she told the paper in an email.

McCorkle said Tuesday that the resource department spoke to the federal agency Monday about the miscommunication. In response, the Natural Resources Department has instituted a new rule requiring consent for such projects to be provided in a formal letter from the director, not verbally or through email, she said.