Frack Job

Two schools, one a vocational technical high school and the other an elementary school, sit on tracts of land a few blocks from the house in which I grew up, in Ford City (Armstrong County), Pennsylvania. The communities served by them are, for the most part, not particularly prosperous. Household incomes, wages, home prices, rents, and levels of education are below the state average; while poverty, unemployment, and air pollution are above it.

Many property owners in the area are elderly women, living on small pensions and social security. Their property taxes finance the schools, and as these rise, the tax burden can be considerable. This encumbrance is made subjectively worse by the fact that these older taxpayers no longer have children in school.

For the local school board, rising costs—including those for the ever growing number of administrators—and a limited and potentially rebellious tax base have created a budget crisis. The current budget shows a deficit of five million dollars. However, the board has come up with an ingenious way to deal with its revenue shortfall.

To help pay its bills, the school board is courting (or being courted by) two energy companies, with an eye toward leasing public property for natural gas hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as “fracking.” According to the school district’s solicitor, the two “frackers,” which are owned by members of the same family, are “offering” to acquire leasing rights on tracts of land near the two schools. “We’re trying to do what we can to bring some money in,” said Board president Joe Close. “Superintendent Stan Chapp said the district projects it could earn up to $1.5 million on it during the next 15 to 20 years.”

The frackers have been busy in Pennsylvania and across the nation—buying and selling leases, greasing the palms of friendly politicians, convincing local residents to sell property rights to them, and ruining the landscape. As the Natural Resources Defense Council states:

Natural gas producers have been running roughshod over communities across the country with their extraction and production activities for too long, resulting in contaminated water supplies, dangerous air pollution, destroyed streams, and devastated landscapes. Weak safeguards and inadequate oversight fail to protect our communities from harm by the rapid expansion of fossil fuel production using hydraulic fracturing or “fracking.”

Fracking has also been implicated in earthquakes. In arid regions, it uses an inordinate share of the local water supply. And it releases methane, a major contributor to global warming. A group of scholars at Cornell University have argued that fracking might be environmentally “dirtier” than mining and burning coal.

Should the school board reach an agreement with the two energy companies, school kids and those living nearby...