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People from several counties speak out on changes they seek to injection laws
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
About 70 people from as far away as Athens, Ohio, attended a meeting Wednesday intended to bring clout to the counties that have experienced the ill effects of brine-injection wells.
Dominic Marchese, a Johnston Township trustee, said he feels as if Ohio is “becoming the new Mexico,” because Ohio receives so much brine waste from Pennsylvania gas and oil wells, and Pennsylvania has the second-most gas and oil production in the United States behind Texas.
Texas takes its brine waste to Mexico, he said.
Trumbull County has 19 brine-injection wells, the most in Ohio, and Pennsylvania has only 13 in the whole state, said Jack Simon, who handles gas- and oil-related matters for the county engineer’s office.
The seven counties with the most brine injection were invited to send a representative to the meeting. They are among the seven counties that have 121 of the 204 injection wells in Ohio, Simon said.
They include counties close to Trumbull – Mahoning, Ashtabula, Stark, Portage, plus two counties in southern Ohio – Morrow and Meigs. A county commissioner and the leader of a citizens group from Athens County, which also is in southern Ohio, also attended.
Coshocton County has the most brine injection in Ohio by volume but is not among the top in Ohio for number of injection wells. Trumbull is second in volume, Simon said.
Trumbull County Commissioner Dan Polivka, Marchese and others said the problem is that the injection wells have set up shop mostly in eastern Ohio, so lawmakers and other state officials elsewhere in the state don’t care that the wells pose dangers to the people living near them.
“There needs to be a [more level] playing field,” Polivka said.
“My concern is our injection well is real close to our school – noise, underground mines. Our concern is the spread of brine water under acres and acres,” said Brookfield Township Trustee Gary Lees.
Polivka said he thinks legal action might be necessary to stop the state from allowing any more injection wells to be created in Trumbull County.
“I think we need an injunction. If we don’t, they’re going to keep doing this to us,” he said of “lax” rules the Ohio Legislature wrote that give no protection to property owners or local governments to limit where they can be placed.
“It ought to be a shame how they wrote those things,” he said.
Roxanne Groff, a township trustee in Athens County, said the rules in Pennsylvania and West Virginia are much more strict than in Ohio. “Our rules are a sham,” she said.
“They’ve turned their backs on us,” Groff said of Ohio Legislators. “Our governor has turned his back on us.”
Mike Chadsey, director of public relations for the Oil and Gas Association, said he thinks Pennsylvania has fewer injection wells than Ohio because the U.S. EPA handles injection wells in that state.
The Trumbull and Ashtabula counties township associations have written 11 proposed changes to Ohio law that they would like to ask the Legislature to make, but a Portage County woman handed out copies of other proposed changes her group would like.