Shepstone Management Company, Inc.
The Scranton Times is a very partisan newspaper and publishing empire that engages in some of the worst hypocrisy. Is it also serving as a DRBC conduit?
The Scranton Times ran a very unusual editorial Monday. The subject, the timing and the arguments made were all exceedingly strange and raise a very serious question. Was this a case of the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC) attempting to influence Federal District Court Judge Robert Mariani through the newspaper? Could be. At a minimum, it’s a case of stupendous hypocrisy on the part of the Scranton Times.
The subject of the Scranton Times editorial is the landowner lawsuit against the DRBC challenging the latter’s right to use any amount of water use as an excuse to regulate any land use. The case is now back before Judge Mariani and he’s been told by the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals that a project cannot simply mean whatever the DRBC wants it to mean, that the DRBC cannot regulate on a whim if there’s a glassful of water involved. It will be up to Mariani to take another look and put some limits on the term project.
The Scranton Times, after laying out the legal question in manner suggesting someone from the DRBC helped with the explanation, and referring to the application of Pennsylvania Senators to intervene in the case, said this in its editorial (emphasis added):
Anyone who ever has visited a gas-drilling site would be hard-pressed to find that it is not a “project,” or to conclude that the pads, drill rigs, fracking apparatus and collection, processing and distribution equipment are not “facilities” that fall under DRBC regulation.
If the DRBC does not have jurisdiction in this matter, it is hard to imagine it could have jurisdiction over a wide array of other development issues. Senators who wish to diminish the commission’s power for the sake of gas drilling thus invite broader challenges to environmental protection and water quality within the Delaware watershed and others that are regulated by multistate bodies.
Read the bolded sentence again. Notice how it’s structured in such a way as to suggest the opposite of what it really says. A first read might tell a casual reader it’s ridiculous to think the DRBC would want use its authority to regulate water projects so as to also regulate development itself. That’s not what it says, though. No, the Scranton Times wants the DRBC to have “jurisdiction over a wide array of other development issues.” It wants to give the DRBC unfettered power to regulate anything and everything involving any amount of water use; which is virtually anything and everything at all.
Appreciating the foolishness of the Scranton Times position only requires looking at their development activity, which includes this roughly 37,500 square feet printing plant constructed in 1988 in Scott Township, Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania.
Printing plants use both chemicals and water, of course. The inks may well be soy-based but they’re still chemicals and then there are the cleaning processes, the waste and so on, not to mention the water used by many employees who work at the plant. It has, in fact Pennsylvania DEP permits for both a septic system and a ground water withdrawal. Interestingly enough, though, the Susquehanna River Basin Commission (SRBC) that governs water projects in the region where the Scranton Times printing plant is located has not classified it as a water project according to this map of SRBC regulated projects.
The SRBC, of course, is the sister agency of the DRBC, governed by the same majority of members with the same responsibilities and similar compacts. So, is the Scranton Times saying it thinks its development activity should have been regulated by the SRBC? Is that what we’re supposed to believe? After all, the Times says the mere existence of such things as “pads, drill rigs, fracking apparatus and collection, processing and distribution equipment” are “facilities” that make something a water project. Well, then, wouldn’t giant printing presses, related industrial processing and distribution apparatus and equipment make a printing plant a water project, too? Of course it would.
That’s the hypocrisy of which I wrote above. The Scranton Times owners have vacation homes in Wayne County, in the DRBC region, so they’re only too pleased to call for DRBC control of everything in that case, but, when it comes to their business and development activity, they don’t have to be bothered. It’s only the DEP that regulates — as it should be. The SRBC does regulate large water withdrawals and discharges connected with gas drilling, which is fine, but it does not regulate the well pads, the natural gas development plans or anything but the water. That’s the point. Neither the DRBC nor the SRBC have any business doing land use regulation, which is what the lawsuit is all about at the end of the day.
Still, this isn’t the most troubling aspect of the editorial. What’s most disturbing is the fact this editorial exhibits what could well be influence from attorneys or other partisans interested in the case and desiring to send a message to the local judge, although anyone familiar with Judge Mariani knows he is not going to be swayed by such antics. The giveaway is this paragraph:
The compact authorizes the commission to deal with pollution issues and water use and to “make and enforce reasonable rules and regulations for the effectuation, application and enforcement of this compact.”
Only someone with an appreciation of what’s at stake legally would include this paragraph because it relates not to the lawsuit in question but, rather, to the DRBC’s “Plan B” in the likely event that DRBC project review authority is struck down or constrained to something akin to what the SRBC, which is to regulate the water and not the land use. The agency wants to try to ban it in that event, an action that will have even less likelihood of success in court. What we have, therefore, putting aside the hypocrisy and influence peddling, is some valuable Scranton Times insight into the landowner lawsuit; that the DRBC is on very shaky legal ground. I’m feeling better about it every day, in fact.
The post Scranton Times Does Hypocrisy As It Attempts to Serve As DRBC Conduit appeared first on Natural Gas Now.
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