No Party Owns the Message

My friend Ron Beitler recently announced on his FaceBook page that he has become a contributor to the website, www.smartgrowthforconservatives.com. Some of the other contributors are heavyweight Smart Growth advocates like Charles Marohn (www.strongtowns.org), Jim Bacon (Bacon's Rebellion) and Joe Minicozzi (Planetizen). In Ron’s words, Smart Growth for Conservatives provides center-right perspectives on transportation and land use issues in the United States as well as analysis of these issues from a center-right perspective with an emphasis on fiscal conservatism and market-based solutions.

I'm more center-left, but I fully embrace Smart Growth principles. So I commented on his post, kiddingly asking him whether there aren’t any liberal Smart Growth websites. Ron’s reply nailed an important distinction about Smart Growth that would probably make the concept more tangible if more people viewed it from this perspective.

Ron said, “No party owns the message! Problem is we (Republicans) have to work harder to get our base to understand that, at its core, Smart Growth is about fiscal sustainability, and that's a message conservatives of all people should flock to. Liberals don't own environmental issues either.”

Then one of Ron’s FB friends commented on Ron’s statement that liberals don't own environmental issues. Ron’s friend said, “The free market left undistorted will value clean water, air, healthy forests, proper developments, etc., and an asset that is valued, is an asset that is well taken care of.” A free-market solution to the world’s problems is certainly a traditional conservative plank.

I don’t buy the argument for a free-market solution to environmental problems. Thirty years ago I would have completely agreed that the free market could take care of the environment, but I was a naïve college student then. While many small businesses in the 21^st century have been built on a model of public responsibility, some of the biggest players pull every string available, legal or otherwise, to maximize their profits at the expense of public health. Don’t even get me started on Monsanto and their GMOs.

Freedom Industries tank farm on Elk River in Charleston. This was the

source of the chemical spill into the Elk River on January 9,2014.

(photo: AP/Steve Helber)

A very recent example of the failure of the free market to protect the environment is the spill of 4-methylcyclohexane methanol (MCHM) in early January into the Elk River in West Virginia. The storage tank that leaked had not been inspected by West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection since 1991. West Virginia regulators are claiming that there was insufficient toxicological data on MCHM to require it to classified as a hazardous substance, which would required regular inspections of its storage tanks. Unfortunately, this chemical leaked into the Elk River just a mile upstream from the inlet for the public water supply for 300,000 West Virginians in nine counties. All of those who did not have a private well were forced to rely on bottled water for two weeks. Restaurants and hotels in Charleston reportedly were losing $1,000,000 in revenue per day until the public water supply was declared safe to use again. All of this disruption was the result of MCHM seemingly falling through the regulatory cracks. The free market did not protect Charleston’s businesses or its drinking water.

No one party owns this message:  Regardless of whether people lean to the right or the left, we need to strive for clean air and clean water now for the sake of our children and our children's children. As a civilized society, we have to proactively make decisions based on what is best for future generations rather than passively letting the free market decide whether our wellbeing will be adequately protected. That should be an imperative that transcends political party affiliations. Whether we are deciding if a certain chemical should be classified as a hazardous substance, thereby having tighter standards for bulk storage, or whether we are making land use decisions that could make open spaces more or less attractive to develop, there are some decisions that a properly functioning government must take the lead on for the best interests of its constituency. After the ground rules have been laid to ensure that we all have access to safe air, water and food, the free market then should be free to function without backroom deals or sweetheart regulatory intervention.

PA Supreme Court Rules on Act 13 Gas Drilling Law

You may have heard that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court recently overturned several key provisions of the state’s controversial Act 13 law which regulates the oil and natural gas industry. Act 13 was enacted in 2012 as a comprehensive update to the state’s oil and gas law to reflect the current activity in the Marcellus Shale natural gas play that underlies a broad swath of PA. Because I’ve written in the past about issues I have with the state of natural gas drilling in the Keystone State, I thought I should comment on the December 19 Supreme Court decision.

I don’t dispute that PA’s oil & gas laws needed to be updated to reflect the unprecedented expansion of natural gas exploration and extraction of Marcellus Shale natural gas over the past 6 years. While a few elements of Act 13 were reasonable updates to the oil & gas law, some elements simply went off the deep end. Just as our U.S. Congress often tries to sneak provisions that favor a particular interest into otherwise good, commonsense legislation, the PA Legislature and Governor Corbett got away with sneaking some pro-industry garbage into Act 13.

One of my biggest problems with Act 13 was that it allowed the gas industry to override local zoning laws. So a gas company could conceivably have drilled in a residentially zoned area or a pipeline company could have built a compressor station or a pipeline right next to a school or daycare center. Many Pennsylvanians who don’t live in the Marcellus Shale regions did not realize that this provision of Act 13 could directly affect them if a natural gas pipeline was someday proposed to cut through their community to transport gas from the gas fields to out-of-state destinations. Fortunately, that zoning override has been declared unconstitutional.

Act 13 also contained a provision many physicians interpreted as a gag rule. While physicians could request lists of chemicals used in gas drilling, including proprietary chemicals claimed to be trade secrets, many doctors felt Act 13’s language did not adequately protect them from legal action by gas companies if they shared the chemical information with their patients potentially exposed to drilling chemicals or with other physicians to collaborate on diagnoses and treatment for patients. When a Pittsburgh physician challenged this provision of Act 13, the Commonwealth Court earlier this year ruled that the doctor had no standing to challenge the provision, because he had not actually requested chemical information from drillers or been blocked from communicating such information to his patients. In their Act 13 decision, the Supreme Court determined that the Pittsburgh doctor has legal standing to challenge the law and sent the case back to Commonwealth Court to reconsider.

State Senate President Pro Tempore Joe Scarnati and House Speaker Sam Smith, both Jefferson County Republicans, released a joint statement saying they were “stunned” by the high court’s ruling and warning the ruling would "harshly impact the economic welfare of Pennsylvanians." I sense that Scarnati and Smith are really only concerned about the present day economic welfare of gas companies and are paying no regard to the potential adverse legacy of the current Marcellus Shale exploitation for Pennsylvanians. PA does not have a favorable track record of energy companies sticking around to clean up their messes after extraction of their target commodity has reached its limit of economic viability. When this gas play is depleted in 20-30 years, will the state be left to clean up hundreds of drilling pad sites around the state using inadequate funds from the performance bonds the drillers had posted decades earlier?

Photo of coal mining spoils in Pennsylvania from Abandoned Mine Reclamation Clearinghouse website (www.amrclearinghouse.org)

Take a drive through PA’s coal regions today, and you’ll still see gaping scars on the landscape where many coal companies, after they had mined-out the coal deposits on their lands in the first half of the 20^th century, abandoned their responsibility to repair the landscape and mitigate the acid mine drainage they had created. The state is still spending public funds to remediate the legacy environmental pollution from irresponsible coal companies.  The rush to tap into and bring to market the Marcellus Shale’s vast natural gas reserves has created the potential for similar corporate recklessness under the mantle of energy independence (which is BS – read what I wrote previously about exporting PA’s natural gas overseas).

I think one of the best results of this ruling was Chief Justice Ron Castille calling a spade a spade: "By any responsible account the exploitation of the Marcellus Shale Formation will produce a detrimental effect on the environment, on the people, their children, and the future generations, and potentially on the public purse, perhaps rivaling the environmental effects of coal extraction."

Castille added that although the state has potentially broad regulatory powers, those powers are limited by PA’s Environmental Rights Amendment. He was referring to Article I, Section 27, of the PA state constitution, ratified by PA voters in 1971:

The people have a right to clean air, pure water, and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic and esthetic values of the environment. Pennsylvania's public natural resources are the common property of all the people, including generations yet to come. As trustee of these resources, the Commonwealth shall conserve and maintain them for the benefit of all the people.

Hopefully this Supreme Court ruling will frame how the public’s environmental rights will be interpreted for future generations of Pennsylvanians, effectively stripping the football from special interests and making them play defense going forward. Hopefully.

No Sidewalks: Can't Get There From Here

While I was writing my previous Streamhugger post about Black Friday Parking, I began to to digress about another issue that was glaringly evident when looking at an aerial photo of the mall where I took photos of vastly underused parking lots. So I figured I better save that rant for a different post. So here is that post about sidewalks, as inspired by the lack thereof around South Mall at the south end of Allentown, PA.

 South Mall property, as currently developed, literally straddles the municipal line between the city of Allentown, and Salisbury Township. Originally farmland, it was first developed commercially in the early 1970s with a lone department store, and the mall grew around that anchor store through the 70s and the 80s.

(Image from Google Maps, annotated by author)

The residential development abutting the mall to the north, Allentown’s Alton Park, was built mostly in the 40s and 50s. The residential development to the west was built in the early 1990s, and the homes to the southwest were built in 1980s. I’m sure the developers for the neighboring homes built in the 80s and 90s used the proximity to a shopping mall as a selling feature. So why then would the developers not have the foresight to build sidewalks connecting to the neighboring shopping mall?

Sidewalk-less residential streets in the neighborhood

immediately west of South Mall.

Dead-end street in the Alton Park neighborhood immed-

lately north of South Mall. There is no pedestrian cut-

through. Only a tree line to separate the neighborhood

from the mall.

The answer to that question is probably that the municipality (Salisbury Township, in the case of the homes to the west and southwest) did not require sidewalks along their residential streets even though they were built adjacent to a large retail destination. With no sidewalks existing in the adjacent neighborhoods, I can almost understand why no one built sidewalks to connect these residential streets directly to the mall. Although, I do not think that omission was justified. In the case of the Alton Park homes, which lie north of and pre-date the mall, I’d assign that blame directly to the mall owner. They chose to plant a treeline along their common property boundary with the Alton Park homes rather than building short walking paths connecting three dead-end streets to the mall property. Blocking neighborhood access with dense vegetation – that seems like a pretty unwelcoming strategy for a retail shopping establishment.

For a municipality to not require sidewalks throughout residential developments and to not connect residential developments to shopping districts (or, in the case of South Mall, to an otherwise extremely conveniently located shopping center) is both short-sighted and incompetent. Not requiring sidewalks for whatever reason is like making the hugely inappropriate assumption people would prefer to rely on automobiles to make even the most basic shopping or social trips. That assumption strips residents of the ability to choose to walk or bike instead relying on automobiles, and 21^st century Americans deserve to have the ability to make that choice. The only parties who are served well by development decisions that make walking and biking inconvenient are the automobile and petroleum industries.

This woman is walking on the sidewalk-less street behind South Mall with her back to oncoming traffic. She is either brave or naive. Considering that she was wearing ear buds and apparently listening to music on her phone, I think that calling her naive might be sugar-coating it.