In a blow to anti-fracking campaigners across the state, the Ohio Supreme Court said this week that the authority to regulate oil and gas drilling activities—and therefore, to ban fracking within municipal borders—lies with the state as opposed to cities, towns, or counties.
As the Akron Beacon Journal put it: “The decision takes local control of drilling away from communities and supports the state as the continued main overseer of drilling.”
“The oil and gas industry has gotten its way, and local control of drilling-location decisions has been unceremoniously taken away from the citizens of Ohio.”
—Justice William O’Neill, Ohio Supreme Court
Several Ohio cities, including Athens, Oberlin, and Mansfield, have passed similar ordinances to ban fracking—some as recently as November 2014—that may now be rendered moot by the court’s decision.
By a 4-3 vote, the justices ruled (pdf) that the state has “exclusive authority” over shale-extraction activities and that cities and counties can neither ban nor regulate fracking through zoning laws or other restrictions.
The decision came in a case brought by an Akron suburb against Beck Energy Corp., which received a state-required permit from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources in 2011 to drill a traditional well on private property in the northeast city of Munroe Falls. The city sued, saying the company illegally evaded local ordinances.
The state’s top court rejected Munroe Falls’ assertion that it was validly exercising ‘home rule,’ which lets communities enact local rules and regulations as long as they don’t conflict with general state law. The court found Munroe Falls’ ordinances amounted to an exercise of ‘police power,’ not self-government, and conflicted with state regulations first enacted in 2004.
According to the Columbus Dispatch:
At least one of the dissenting judges agreed that the victor in the court’s decision was the fossil fuels industry.
“Let’s be clear here,” Justice William O’Neill wrote in his dissenting opinion. “The Ohio General Assembly has created a zookeeper to feed the elephant in the living room. What the drilling industry has bought and paid for in campaign contributions they shall receive. The oil and gas industry has gotten its way, and local control of drilling-location decisions has been unceremoniously taken away from the citizens of Ohio.”
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