Yesterday, in a huge victory for community rights and the environment, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled Act 13, the law which preempted the rights of community to use zoning to guide placement of oil and gas activities, unconstitutional, finding it violates the Pennsylvania Constitution’s Environmental Rights Amendment.
Quotes from the opinion include the following:
“As the citizens illustrate, development of the natural gas industry in the Commonwealth unquestionably has and will have a lasting and undeniably detrimental, impact on the quality of these core aspects (life, health, and liberty: surface and ground water, ambient air, etc.) of Pennsylvania’s environment, which are part of the public trust.” Opinion, page 117.
“By any responsible account, the exploitation of the Marcellus Shale Formation will produce a detrimental effect on the environment, on the people, their children, and future generations, and potentially on the public purse, perhaps rivaling the environmental effects of coal extraction.” Opinion, page 118.
The full opinion can be found here.
Mountain Watershed Association submitted an Amicus Curiae, or Friend of the Court, brief supporting the position of the petitioners, which included several townships in Allegheny, Washington, and Bucks Counties, Dr. Mehernosh Khan, and the Delaware Riverkeeper Network (DRN). For DRN’s full press release, please click here. Ecowatch coverage of the various Amici briefs can be found here.
In our brief, which is available in its entirety here, we argued Act 13 is a violation of Article 1 §27 of the Pennsylvania Constitution, which provides Pennsylvania citizens “with a right to clean air, pure water, and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic and esthetic values of the environment.” This section of the Constitution further states, “Pennsylvania’s public natural resources are the common property of all the people, including generations yet to come. As trustee of these resources, the Commonwealth shall conserve and maintain them for the benefit of all the people.”
In our brief, we stated, “Act 13 unconstitutionally eviscerates the public trust duty of all municipalities under Article 1 §27 of the Pennsylvania Constitution.”
This is undeniably a huge victory for community rights in Pennsylvania. It will allow municipalities to once again use zoning to guide the placement of oil and gas infrastructure, giving them a mechanism for limiting the development of these activities in residential or otherwise sensitive areas and thus protecting the health and quality of life for citizens across Pennsylvania. We congratulate Delaware Riverkeeper Network and all of the other petitioners and involved parties for their dedication to this issue.