Selling out Ohio, its parklands and people, for fracking’s fleeting allure: Thomas Suddes

Nothing better shows how Ohio gets sold to the highest bidder – all nice and legal – than the antics of the state’s Oil and Gas Land Management Commission. The panel, despite overwhelming public opposition, but with the General Assembly’s lobby-lubricated support, lets oil-and-gas drillers frack under Ohio’s state parks and wildlife areas.

True, the drillers have to pay the state money for the right to do so. But it’s hard to imagine those payments could cover potentially costly environmental damages, if they occur, to Ohioans’ public property – their state lands.

Gov. Mike DeWine, a Cedarville Republican, appoints the commission, whose operating philosophy seems to echo 19th-century railroad mogul William H. Vanderbilt’s take on popular opinion – “The public be damned.”

The Oil and Gas Land Management Commission’s exploitation of what is, legally speaking, the property of all Ohioans has been eloquently reported by cleveland.com’s Jake Zuckerman.

An Ohioan has to wonder what public-relations alibi DeWine, who leaves office in two years, and Ohio’s dysfunctional legislature, will improvise when, as could happen, commission-approved fracking pollutes a state park or natural area.

DeWine’s predecessor, fellow Republican John R. Kasich, of Westerville, blocked fracking in state parks and natural areas. Kasich also tried boosting the severance tax on minerals and oil and gas produced in Ohio, but Republican legislators balked. Ohio’s laughably light severance tax on gas production is 2.5 cents per thousand cubic feet, and, on oil, 10 cents per barrel.

Fracking of state lands, and the accompanying risks, runs counter to the pro-conservation tradition that Ohio Republicans long embraced. Then-ex-President Theodore Roosevelt, addressing Ohio’s 1912 constitutional convention, said this: “This country, as Lincoln said, belongs to the people. So do the natural resources which make it rich.” Ohio voters OK’d a convention-proposed constitutional amendment empowering the General Assembly to promote conservation.

Convention Delegate Frederick G. Leete, an Ironton Republican and a civil engineer, described by regional historian Daniel Webster Williams, a Jackson editor and state senator, as “one of the acknowledged leaders of the [convention’s] conservation forces,” warned fellow delegates that they needed to protect Ohio’s forests and waters: “Capital is now seeking to acquire rights on a number of streams in the state,” Leete said, “and the people in the vicinity where such rights have been secured will wake up some day to the fact that they are at the mercy of some corporation.”

Especially sickening is that this story has played out before — of Appalachian Ohio being ravished by corporate interests, who, after gorging on Ohio-gleaned profits, leave the region to languish.

People who traverse Ohio’s Appalachian counties today sometimes wonder how the state could, say, let coal companies, transform fields and forests into strip-mined moonscapes. Easy: Coal barons donated bigtime to pals at the Statehouse. (In that connection, it’s believed that not until 1959 was anyone prosecuted for violating Ohio’s original 1913 lobbying law. The target: a lawyer-lobbyist whose client was Ohio’s coal industry. Big surprise.)

The economic “benefits” of such resource-exporting regions of Ohio are with us yet. The Center for Community Solutions in Cleveland reported last year that, “while the highest rates of poverty may be in Ohio’s cities, Appalachia accounts for the largest swaths, geographically, of the state living in high rates of poverty.” And while the center didn’t say so, that’s very likely a major consequence of the slash-and-burn economics of natural-resource extraction:

Go in; drill, scrape or mine; return to New York, Dallas, wherever. It was coal yesterday. It’s gas, today – risking lands reserved for all Ohioans’ enjoyment, including those who fish and hunt, that may be marred in the relentless search for private gain (and Statehouse donations).

As if the status quo weren’t bad enough, the Senate and House voted last week to pass initially innocuous Substitute House Bill 308 that – as rewritten by a Senate committee – requires the Land Management Commission to lengthen the term of leases that let frackers exploit state-owned lands. The bill’s headed to DeWine’s desk. To ask whether the governor will sign it is like asking if the sun will come up tomorrow. Is this really the Ohio that voters want to bequeath their daughters and sons – at least those who aren’t already so discouraged that they’re leaving?

Thomas Suddes, a member of the editorial board, writes from Athens.

To reach Thomas Suddes: tsuddes@cleveland.com, 216-408-9474

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