Less than three years after signing legislation opening up Ohio state parks and forests to fracking, Gov. John Kasich now opposes the controversial horizontal drilling for oil and gas on public lands.
“At this point, the governor doesn’t support fracking in state parks,” Kasich spokesman Rob Nichols told The Dispatch. “We reserve the right to revisit that, but it’s not what he wants to do right now, and that’s been his position for the past year and a half.”
Word of Kasich’s reversal came the same day Democratic lawmakers called for an investigation of a marketing plan to promote fracking on state lands that was put together a year and a half ago by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, which regulates oil and gas drilling.
Nichols said the dust-up over the previously undisclosed 10-page memo from August 2012 had nothing to do with Kasich’s stance.
“Ohio doesn’t permit this kind of oil and gas production in state parks because the governor doesn’t think we have the policies in place yet to properly do it. If and when that changes, then perhaps this hypothetical discussion has relevance. But until then, it’s a political sideshow conjured up by people who want to kill fracking and the jobs it creates.”
While Kasich hadn’t made his change of feelings public, he never appointed a five-member commission that would have leased park and forest mineral rights to the highest bidders. The state law Kasich signed in mid-2011 gave him until November 2011 to appoint the panel, which then had until June 2012 to come up with rules.
“Horizontal drilling in state parks has never been authorized before in Ohio, and the people we appoint to the commission will immediately have a number of significant decisions to make, and so we’re being very deliberative about how we go about filling these seats,” Nichols said Monday when asked about the delay.
Kasich had supported fracking state lands to help erase a $500 million maintenance backlog at Ohio state parks.
Democrats called the August 2012 public-relations plan — which the administration says was never implemented — unconscionable, political and targeted.
Reps. Robert F. Hagan of Youngstown and Nickie Antonio of Lakewood said the plan shows the administration is working with the oil and gas industry instead of independently regulating it. The demand for an investigation — which Hagan and Antonio delivered in writing to House Speaker William G. Batchelder, R-Medina — was echoed by state environmental and liberal groups, as well as their caucus leader and the Ohio Democratic Party.
Mike Dittoe, spokesman for Batchelder, said, “The speaker appreciates the members looking into this issue. He will take their request, as he does with all requests like this, under advisement in the future.”
Rep. Tracy Maxwell Heard, D-Columbus, House minority leader, said, “It is unconscionable that Gov. Kasich’s office lied about their involvement in the whole politically motivated scheme to target and discredit those who care about public health, safety and jobs.”
Nichols initially told The Dispatch that the governor’s office knew nothing about the plan. However, an email shows that Kasich’s top officials actually convened a meeting to discuss the campaign, whose stated goal was to “marginalize the effectiveness of communications by adversaries about the initiative” to bring fracking to state parks and forests. Several environmental organizations, including the Ohio Sierra Club, plus Hagan and Antonio were targeted for “zealous resistance” that must be overcome.
Nichols said yesterday: “Rep. Hagan and the Sierra Club — one of the largest secretly funded groups on the planet — have a pact to try and kill the fracking jobs that are helping get Mr. Hagan’s own communities back on track. It’s pretty hard to reason with folks bent on that kind of self-destruction.”
Will Drabold is a fellow in Ohio University’s E.W. Scripps School of Journalism Statehouse News Bureau.