ADAMS TWP — The effort of a pro-drilling group to broker a deal with the township and a gas drilling company has fallen flat.

John Watson told the township supervisors last year that he and his group would try to find a driller to extract the natural gas beneath the community park on Valencia Road.

Watson said at an August 2014 supervisors meeting that if a driller offered the township $3,000 per acre up front, the township stood to earn $420,000 for its 140 acre park.

Supervisors Chairman Donald Aiken said Watson could present a proposal to supervisors if he wished.

But on Monday Watson said the proliferation of shale gas wells in the area has caused the price of natural gas to drop so low that few wells are being drilled.

“They’ve been way too successful,” Watson said.

He said until natural gas is routinely used as a fuel for buses and cars, the market will remain flooded.

“Now, it’s a bad market,” Watson said.

Also, to sell shale gas under the park, the supervisors must bid the project instead of drillers making an offer, Watson said.

He said the construction of pipeline to move the natural gas from well sites to processing plants is the main shale-gas related work going on now.

In another case, the Mars School Board is not pursuing a possible second chance at a gas lease.

The board in October voted to allow the district solicitor and the superintendent to meet with the executive director and solicitor from MHY Family Services, which is next door to the school district, about gas leasing.

District solicitor Tom King explained that MHY officials had requested the meeting, which would reopen the discussion on leasing school property for shale gas extraction.

The school board rejected a lease offer from Rex Energy in the spring of 2014. Without a district lease, Rex Energy is not interested in leasing with MHY Family Services. MHY would have benefited financially from a lease with Rex.

King said he and former superintendent William Pettigrew met with MHY officials several months ago, but nothing happened because the school district never received another offer from Rex Energy.

“There is no reason to meet or continue to talk because we never had a second offer (from Rex),” King said.

When the school board last year voted down the lease, a group of Mars parents who oppose the five Marcellus shale gas wells on a farm near the schools cheered.