Pa. county's efforts to strike wealth put on hold
Pennsylvania landowners are now finding that leasing their land to natural gas drillers wasn't all it was cracked up to be.
Bloomberg focused a story to be published in print next week on Wayne County, Pa., where there is no drilling; the Delaware River Basin Commission, a regional regulatory agency, has declared a moratorium while it studies the environmental impact of hydraulic fracturing. In the mean time, gas companies have put their contracts with property owners on hold.
“It’s the biggest thing ever happened around here, in my lifetime at least,” says Alliance member Bob Rutledge, a dairy and beef farmer whose family has been in Wayne for 170 years. “People here struggle. The economy here sucks when it’s good. The farms are dying.” Spokesmen for Hess, Chesapeake, Cabot, and Newfield declined to comment.
Honesdale, the county seat, last saw a boom like this in the 1820s, when it was the starting point for the new Delaware & Hudson Canal. In March 2009, Leonard Schwartz, recently retired as chief executive officer of chemical company Aceto, reopened Honesdale’s 182-year-old Hotel Wayne. He gutted and redecorated its rooms and upgraded its restaurant and bar to accommodate out-of-town speculators and energy company officials with expense accounts.
“The gas companies were giving out money,” says Schwartz. “People were buying tractors, eating out. You felt it.”