HARRISBURG — A group including seven municipalities Thursday sued the state of Pennsylvania over its new law regulating the rapid growth of natural gas exploration, saying among other things that it unconstitutionally takes away the power to control property from towns and landowners for the benefit of the oil and gas industry.

The lawsuit was filed in state Commonwealth Court. Plaintiffs include townships in southwestern Pennsylvania — Robinson, Peters, Cecil and Mount Pleasant in Washington County, and South Fayette in Allegheny County — where exploration of the Marcellus Shale is under way, and Nockamixon Township and Yardley Borough in southeastern Pennsylvania’s Bucks County where officials are worried about their inability to control future exploration of different natural gas formations.

Among the objectionable provisions cited by the lawsuit are requirements that drilling, waste pits and pipelines be allowed in every zoning district, including residential districts, as long as certain buffers are observed.

“As municipalities can expect hundreds of wells, numerous impoundments, miles of pipelines, several compressor and processing plants, all within (their) borders, they will be left to plan around rather than plan for orderly growth,” the lawsuit said.

In addition to allowing counties to impose a drilling fee on their local gas wells, the sweeping, six-week-old law grants the industry the predictable rules it had sought, the lawsuit said.

“However, it did so at the expense of the predictability afforded to ... the citizens of Pennsylvania whose health, safety and welfare, community development objectives, zoning districts and concerns regarding property values were pushed aside to elevate the interests of out-of-state oil and gas companies and the owners of hydrocarbons underlying each property, who are frequently not the surface owners,” the lawsuit said.

Gov. Tom Corbett, a Republican, took office in 2011 and backed the industry’s objectives, believing that a 1984 state law had intended to outlaw municipal regulation of oil and gas operations anyway.