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Sen. Bartolotta participates in hearing on gas impact fee

2 min read

Sen. Camera Bartolotta, R-Carroll Township, participated in her first major committee hearing Tuesday highlighting the natural gas impact fee. The hearing took place on the same day Gov. Tom Wolf proposed a severance tax on natural gas production as a part of his budget.

Bartolotta said the impact fee, otherwise known as Act 13, already taxes the gas industry enough. She said Wolf’s severance tax puts the local impact fee at risk.

“When you start taxing an industry, they move elsewhere,” she said. “They can wait out an unfriendly governor. Implementing a severance tax would be very damaging to the industry and jobs in Southwestern Pennsylvania.”

Bartolotta said the severance tax would cap the amount of money municipalities would receive from the gas industry at $225 million per year.

“It caps the growth of an incredibly beneficial industry,” she said.

The hearing was well-attended with representatives from eight counties present, Bartolotta said. Greene County Commissioner Charles Morris was among them. Morris said the impact fee has been extremely beneficial for Greene County, and he would hate to see something happen to county’s additional income.

“We’ve used that money to make repairs at the courthouse (among other places). If we didn’t have those funds, we would have had to find them elsewhere,” he said.

Wolf’s tax proposal would raise an estimated $765.3 million for the state’s general fund, and would transfer $225 million to a separate fund to replace the impact fee that companies currently pay to state and local governments based on the number of wells they drill. The bulk of the tax revenue would be invested into public education.

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