Ohio high court says city can’t stop drilling

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GreenGavelBeck Energy Corp. will continue to drill for oil over an Ohio city’s, objections under a recent ruling by the state supreme court.

State and local laws conflicted when the Ohio-based drilling company got a state-issued permit to drill within the city limits of Munroe Falls. City officials said it violated five local ordinances.

“I am disappointed in the outcome, but I am thankful that they reviewed the issue,” said Thomas Houlihan, the attorney representing Munroe Falls, a town of around 5,000 residents located in the east-central portion of Summit County. “It was a question of whether Ohio States gas drilling law superseded local zoning ordinances and the court found it did in this case.”

Local ordinances required the drilling company to get a permit from both the state and the city. Ohio state law only requires one from the state.

Houlihan said he believed the ruling was unique, and may have been a consequence of the local ordinances’ narrow wording. Beck officials disagree and say the ruling widely affects other Ohio communities.

In addition to oil and gas ordinances, Munroe Falls had a zoning ordinance that said it has a right to control how its residents use their land, Houlihan said. If that ordinance said drilling companies could only drill in certain zones instead of requiring separate licenses statewide, the outcome may have been different.

However, John Keller, attorney for Beck Energy, said that while the court’s ruling pleased him, he was not surprised.

“Just like the federal government reserves some issues to itself that states cannot address, the state reserves to itself some that the local governments cannot regulate,” Keller said. “In Ohio, one area is oil and gas drilling. This decision reflects that the state officials that have the expertise to regulate this activity should control it over local governments.”

In 2004, Ohio state law was revised to uniformly regulate oil and gas production, according to court documents. This allowed Beck Energy to get a permit through the Ohio Department of Natural Resources in 2011.

“For quite some time people have understood that local officials do not have authority and have not attempted to enforce their ordinances,” Keller said. “Monroe Falls attempted to do what most other cities have not done, and lost.”

However, the ordinances that Munroe Falls was trying to enforce were in place long before the 2004 change in law, Houlihan said.

In court, Houlihan argued that the state should be responsible for regulating well construction and operation, while local governments should be able to designate areas where that can be performed.

“When the law changed in 2004, the state didn’t change anything in state oil and gas law in determining where wells were not appropriate,” Houlihan said. “Our argument was that the state legislature did not wipe out local zoning power.”

Keller disagreed.

“There is a rigorous process to get a permit from the state to drill wells depending on what kind you’re drilling and where you are drilling,” he said.

The ruling sets a precedent for other cities, he said.

“If they have laws that say you have to get a separate permit from the city, this case says they cannot enforce those things,” he said. “There are a lot of cities that have similar regulations and those are not enforceable so I think this will have an impact.”

 

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