BUTLER TWP — About 125 municipal officials in Butler County learned Tuesday night that they have limited authority when it comes to regulating Marcellus Shale natural gas drilling.

The Oil and Gas Act is the state's primary statute which supersedes municipal authority, according to Ross Pifer, director of the Agricultural Law Resource & Reference Center at Penn State University.

He was one of several speakers at a forum on Marcellus Shale gas at Butler County Community College.

Pifer said the state law preempts all municipal regulation of gas drilling except under two sections of law.

“Municipalities have limited authority to regulate under the Municipal Planning Code and the Flood Plain Management Act,” Pifer said.

At the same time, even under those codes, municipalities cannot regulate the same features or try to accomplish the same purposes as the Oil and Gas Act, Pifer said.

Pifer pointed to two state Supreme Court cases that illustrate permissible and nonpermissible municipal regulations.

In the Huntley & Huntley versus the Borough of Oakmont case, the community successfully stopped drilling in zoned residential areas.

The state court said that the features the community regulated through zoning, that is, the location of wells, was not the same as the technical features of wells in the Oil & Gas Act.

But Salem Township, Westmoreland County, had a different outcome in its state Supreme Court lawsuit, brought by Range Resources.

Salem Township had created what the court called “a comprehensive regulatory scheme” for regulating drilling which the court ruled overlapped with the Oil & Gas Act.

The township's law was intended to regulate both the features and the purposes of drilling, the court said, and overturned it.

Other townships also have attempted to enact ordinances outside the Municipal Planning Code and lost in court, Pifer said.

Fayette County has taken another route to regulate drilling, using zoning laws.

The county decided that companies may drill in residential, industrial and airport zones only by special exception, Pifer said.

Although a state appeals court found the county's zoning permissible, the Penneco Oil Co. has asked the state Supreme Court to review the case. The court has not decided whether or not it will do so, Pifer said.

Regarding Marcellus Shale natural gas issues, Pifer recommended local officials:

• Look to laws governing timber harvesting to determine road bonding for overweight gas drilling vehicles. Municipalities can post road weight limits, if none exist, he said.

• Understand that gas companies are required to get a state Department of Environmental Protection permit before they drill and report the results of their drilling every six months.

• Know that natural gas wells are not permitted within 200 feet of a building or 100 feet from a water supply, and landowners may negotiate additional set back footage in a lease.

• Know that drillers are required to notify landowners, those with a water supply within 1,000 feet of a drill site, and coal mine operations that they plan to build a well. Those persons have 15 days to file an objection to contest the drilling.

• Know that there is a “presumption of liability” for gas drillers if a water well within the 1,000-foot radius of a gas well is polluted within six months of drilling. Those outside that radius will need to prove that drilling damaged their water supply.

• Be aware of the rules regarding well site restoration, and that gas tanks, valves and transmission lines will remain long after the well is capped.

More information is available on the law school's website, www.law.psu.edu/aglaw

Municipal officials may get maps of well sites from the DEP website. The site includes information about a well's ownership and its output.

The local officials also learned that BC3 in June will open a gas well training facility for first responders, according to Mel Bliss, coordinator of the public safety training facility said.

First responders, like police and firefighters, will be trained to deal with emergencies at drilling sites, which may include industrial chemicals and low levels of radiation.

The forum is the second of three seminars sponsored by the Penn State Marcellus Consortium and hosted by BC3, Penn State, the county Chamber of Commerce, and the county Tourism and Convention Bureau. Tuesday's session also was sponsored by the Butler County Council of Governments.