This article by Chauncey Ross appeared in The Indiana Gazette on April 26th, 2019.

EAST RUN — A federal court ruling earlier this month has left dark clouds over northeastern Indiana County.

U.S. District Court Judge Susan Baxter ordered Grant Township to pay $103,000 of the legal expenses connected with a lawsuit that a major oil and gas drilling company filed against the municipality.

The decision came a year after Baxter ruled in favor of Pennsylvania General Energy, which had sued to overturn a township ordinance that prohibited the disposal of drilling waste. The ordinance targeted a PGE plan for an injection well near East Run.

While local leaders say the heart of the ruling is meaningless — because Grant Township had already repealed what it called the “Community Bill of Rights” ordinance — they’re holding hope that the township may withstand a second lawsuit still pending in a state court.

The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection brought suit in 2017, charging that Grant — after adopting a home rule charter form of government — was illegally preventing DEP from carrying out its responsibility as a state agency.

The home rule charter, under which Grant again prohibited waste dumping in injection wells, interfered with DEP’s authority to grant an injection well permit to PGE under terms of the state’s Oil and Gas Act and Solid Waste Management Act, according to a petition filed in March 2017 in Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court.

A township official and an environmental advocate believe that the township is being made an example, and that the outcome of the case will have bearing on the proliferation of waste dumping in tapped out wells in the rest of Indiana County and through Pennsylvania.

Township Supervisor Stacy Long called it a “slap suit.”

“The judge has to make an example of us,” Long said. “That if other communities get the idea that they can pass ordinances or bans willy-nilly, they will get sued.”

Read the rest of this article at its original source HERE.