Murrysville Watch Committee makes final appeal to challenge fracking ordinance

After being rebuffed by the state’s Commonwealth Court in its appeal of a challenge to Murrysville’s unconventional gas drilling ordinance, members of the Murrysville Watch Committee will appeal to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

Committee attorney John Smith filed a petition this week asking for the state’s highest court to consider granting an appeal hearing.

The committee began the yearslong journey in 2018, challenging the validity of what was Murrysville’s recently adopted ordinance on unconventional drilling, or fracking. That challenge was heard by the municipality’s zoning hearing board, which upheld the ordinance, a decision that was unsuccessfully appealed at the county (2020) and state (2021) levels.

A large part of the committee’s argument along the way has been to emphasize what they consider the incompatibility of drilling with the residential-zoned areas that make up the majority of an overlay district, where Murrysville officials said drilling could take place.

In the committee’s petition to the Supreme Court, Smith said the Commonwealth Court failed to follow Supreme Court precedent “requiring respondents to utilize compatibility of land uses and the stated purpose of the zoning district to determine the propriety of a land use in a given zoning district.”

Smith said Murrysville’s determination of a 750-foot setback from well pads “was not based on public health, but on the feasibility of drilling.”

He said the courts should recognize that an overlay district such as Murrysville’s “upsets the protection and purpose of the underlying zoning district (and is) an inappropriate use of zoning.”

The Commonwealth Court opinion, written by Judge Patricia McCullough, focused on the committee’s speculation as to the potential effects of drilling, rather than challenging specific findings of fact that emerged from the original challenge with the Murrysville Zoning Hearing Board.

McCullough referenced the Frederick fracking case, in which several Allegheny Township residents sued their local government after its approval of a Marcellus shale gas well pad within 1,200 feet of their homes.

In that case, the court’s opinion was that concerns expressed by homeowners consisted of “speculation of possible harms,” which was “insufficient to show that the proposed natural gas well will be detrimental to the health, safety and welfare of the neighborhood.”

Work on the Olympus Energy Titan well pad off Bollinger Road, the first well approved in Murrysville under the new ordinance, is ongoing.