County Board of Supervisors put in strong zoning restrictions before looking into imposing an all-out frac ban

From Fredricksburg.com/The Free Lance-Star

Westmoreland County, Va. – Moments after the Westmoreland Board of Supervisors passed amendments Monday night to strictly limit gas and oil drilling, board members asked the county attorney to start researching a possible moratorium on the activity.

Supervisors said they wanted to have protections in place through their zoning ordinance before they looked into an all-out ban.

“That’s the reason we went in that sequence,” said Board Chairman Darryl Fisher.

Westmoreland officials worried what would happen if they banned the activity—as nearby Richmond County did in November—and then the state decided it wasn’t legal for localities to take such an action.

Westmoreland’s county attorney is Richard Stuart, a Montross lawyer who also serves in the Virginia Senate. He advised them to put regulations in place first, then decide if they want to prohibit hydraulic fracturing, the process of injecting water deep into the ground to loosen trapped gas and oil.

Virginia AG Herring said in 2015 that counties have authority to restrict or ban fracing through zoning and land use ordinances

Stuart referred to a May 2015 opinion by Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring, which declared counties have the authority to restrict—or even ban—fracking through zoning and land-use ordinances.

“I don’t know that I would entirely hang my hat on that opinion,” Stuart said.

Two years earlier, then-Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli said the opposite. He advised that counties could place reasonable restrictions on where gas wells are drilled, but could not ban the activity altogether.

Attorneys general provide guidance on legal matters, but those opinions do not carry the same force of law as judges’ rulings.

Officials in Westmoreland, a county bordered by the Rappahannock and Potomac rivers—with many tributaries running throughout its rural locality—followed their attorney’s advice. They changed both their Comprehensive Plan and zoning ordinances to protect the quality and quantity of their water, agricultural and forest land, historic and scenic resources and rural character, according to the new amendment.

Ordinance creates a resource extraction district where fracing would be allowed only by special exception

The ordinance creates a new resource extraction, planned development district where fracking would be allowed by special exception. And that’s only after would-be drillers complete an extensive application that addresses impacts on traffic and noise, water and county infrastructure and includes maps, narratives and an extensive site plan.

The minimum size of a drilling district would be 40 acres. That could include smaller contiguous lots of 10 to 20 acres, according to the amendment.

The space between the drilling operations and “resource protection areas,” such as wetlands, houses, school and public and private wells could range from 500 feet to more than half a mile.

Westmoreland planners, its Planning Commission and Board of Supervisors have been grappling with how to deal with fracking for three years. The new zoning ordinance covers 18 pages and includes an extensive number of requirements.

“The Planning Commission went into a lot of detail in order to make it as hard as possible to get a permit to drill,” said Supervisor Russ Culver.

Supervisor W.W. “Woody” Hynson did not vote on the fracking measures. Both he and his parents before him rented land to an oil company for possible drilling, and he decided to refrain from voting so it wouldn’t appear he was influenced by the money. Hynson also said his lease with Shore Exploration Corp. expired last year.

About 14,000 acres in Westmoreland had leases for possible drilling with Shore, a company with headquarters in Dallas. Westmoreland is one of five localities in the Taylorsville basin, an area east and south of Fredericksburg where Shore had leased about 84,000 acres for possible drilling.

No one from the gas and oil industry attended Monday night’s meeting in Montross. But a year ago, Miles Morin, executive director of the Virginia Petroleum Council, submitted a written response to Westmoreland’s proposal to put strict regulations in place.

As he’s done with other localities debating drilling amendments, Morin stressed that Virginia already has plenty of comprehensive regulations governing oil and gas drilling. He also said Virginia has a “99.9 percent or 100 percent environmental record over the past five years.”

Morin also offered some insight into the industry’s view of the Taylorsville basin, and the company that proposed drilling there.

“If the oil and gas industry thought the Taylorsville basin had immense potential, it would have been permitted and drilled years ago during the boom, when prices were double or more what they are today,” Morin wrote.

“The leases that exist in this area were one company’s speculative play,” he continued. “If one of our members really wanted to drill here, you would probably have heard from them already.”


Legal Notice