Impact fees need to stay in communities
The Friday edition of the Observer-Reporter had a front page story concerning the Pennsylvania Senate and tax increases. Allow me to correct the statement made by state Sen. Camera Bartolotta, who said, “These employers already pay a severance tax. We just call it an impact fee.” This is an attempt by Bartolotta to obscure the differences between an impact fee and a severance tax.
A severence tax is a fee paid for extracting a valuable and finite resource. An impact fee was designed by lawmakers to compensate communities for the additional costs to local budgets caused by fracking, such as increased use of roads, zoning problems and engineering issues. This fee is in no way a severance tax, and should not be construed as one by sympathetic legislators or natural gas lobbyists. It is designed to mitigate the inconveniences we tolerate every day in this section of Washington County, such as road closures due to pipeline construction, yellow blinking lights on wide-load trucks that force one to the side of the road, caravans of water trucks that fail to yield at stop signs and the noise of compressors running constantly.
These are the reasons for an impact fee – to compensate people that are impacted by this activity. It has no business being placed in the state treasury and shared by anyone but the residents of communities truly impacted by fracking.
J.R. Morton
Eighty Four