By the Jan. 11 deadline set by the state, concerned citizens filed more than 200,000 comments blasting the deficiencies in the draft regulations.
New York’s four-year effort to assess the safety of the controversial gas drilling practice known as fracking is broken. To fix it, the state must either declare a ban on fracking, or extend the moratorium now in place while it addresses the fundamental flaws in what has been, to date, an almost Kafkaesque regulatory process.
The environmental community is aghast at how New York is handling fracking. Many of us feel that we’ve never seen anything like the train wreck unfolding before us. And, it’s not just the greens who are crying foul--veteran Albany columnist Fred LeBrun recently observed that:
“The rulemaking process … has been from hell, an abomination. The public has been deceived, misdirected and kept utterly in the dark over where the state was heading concerning the most important ...