Jon Kark of upstate Fenton is suing Gov. Cuomo because he’s sick of spending just a week or two a year with his family.
Kark is part of a coalition of New York landowners who last month sued Cuomo and top officials at two state agencies in pursuit of their right to develop the rich Marcellus Shale beneath their land. (The plaintiffs are represented by Mountain States Legal Foundation, which I head, and New York counsel.)
The state has stalled for six years on letting New Yorkers develop energy on their land, and these residents have waited long enough for the endlessly promised environmental study.
For six generations, Jon Kark’s family’s has held their land in north central Broome County, northeast of Binghamton. He and his wife Patricia use their 353 acres to run 50 head of cattle as well a nonprofit, nondenominational Christian camp his father created in 1970.
Jon Kark would rather run cattle, operate his trucking company, help with the camp and spend time with his wife, four children and four grandkids — but for the last six years he has been everywhere but home.
Good news: In July 2007, Kark leased his mineral rights to an independent oil and gas company for a five-year term. If the company drilled, made a discovery and produced natural gas, it would pay a royalty. Bad news: The potential value of that gas increased his property taxes.
More bad news: In July 2008, then-Gov. David Paterson imposed a moratorium on permits for wells using horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing — the six-decade-old technology whose modern application has unlocked vast amounts of energy on land across America — pending an environmental study.
In June 2009, anticipating completion of the study, Kark’s lessee filed six horizontal well applications. By then, Jon had left town.
Fearing loss of the family farm under the pressure of its mortgage and the county’s taxes, Kark hired on as a heavy equipment operator to develop energy resources from coast to coast. In July 2012, he got lucky: His lessee extended for another five years, and he got to go home for two weeks at Christmas. In 2013, he was home one week.
For four years now, Cuomo and two state agencies that report to him have held up the environmental study that’s the only thing preventing fracking in New York, even as the process is used safely all across America.
If Kark’s lessee could drill, Jon could afford to pay those higher property taxes without being away from home. You see why he and others, including the Joint Landowners Coalition of New York with its 38 landowner groups that represent over 70,000 landowners and a million acres across 14 counties, have filed suit.
The irony for Jon Kark and those others is that it’s the stated policy of New York to promote development of its oil and natural-gas resources. Every state agency and its officials are legally mandated to adhere to that policy, including processing oil- and gas-well permit applications “as expeditiously as possible.”
Specifically, the State Environmental Quality Review Act requires the Department of Environmental Conservation, or DEC, which oversees the regulation of oil and natural-gas drilling, to not only consider environmental impact, but also to expedite proceedings to minimize procedural and administrative delays in obtaining drilling permits.
In fact, to streamline the well-permitting process, the DEC back in 1992 issued a Generic Environmental Impact Statement that recognized the use of fracking. In addition, in 2008, the Legislature amended the Environmental Conservation Law to provide specifically for the spacing requirements for wells using horizontal drilling and fracking.
Apparently, none of this matters to Cuomo and his officials, because they continue to ignore their obligation to develop New York’s rich natural-gas resources.
Thus far, the DEC has spent nearly six years on the study, released a “draft supplemental” GEIS, received thousands of public comments, held multiple public meetings and issued a “revised draft supplemental” GEIS. The one thing it refuses to do, under Cuomo’s apparent “study it to death policy,” is to publish the final GEIS.
Meanwhile, Jon Kark does whatever it takes to save his farm from death by taxes and regulatory overkill.
William Perry Pendley is president of Mountain States Legal Foundation in Denver and author of “Sagebrush Rebel.”