Update: Commissioners will host a public meeting for Tuesday, Nov. 19, 7-9 p.m. at the Athens Community Center, E. State St., Athens, on injection wells:
“The Athens County Board of Commissioners will be holding a public meeting on the injection well application for a new well permit in Athens County for K & H Partners. This meeting will take place on November 19, 2013 at the Athens Community Center on East State St. from 7 until 9 p.m.
Those wishing to speak are asked to keep their comments brief so that everyone will have an opportunity to talk. Written comments will also be accepted.
Representatives from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, K & H Partners and the media have been invited to attend. If you have questions, please contact the Athens County Board of Commissioners at 740-592-3219.”
ACFAN notes in preparation for meeting:
Please bring written comments, which can be longer than the brief comments you may wish to present orally.
Check out acfan.org injection well page for talking points.
Please feel free to address broader problems with ODNR regulation of injection wells in order to alert USEPA to its responsibility to revoke Ohio’s primacy (authority) over the injection well program. See acfan.org talking points for arguments.
Please thank the Commissioners for responding to our request that they hold this meeting. This meeting can help us make USEPA aware of our community’s great concerns about ODNR negligence and ODNR refusal to grant a public hearing or listen to our concerns. Thank you!
Athens Messenger, Tuesday, Oct. 29:
By STEVE ROBB Messenger staff journalist
A public meeting will be held by the Athens County Commissioners so that people can express their views on a pending injection well permit application.
The meeting was requested Tuesday by the Athens County Fracking Action Network (ACFAN), although a date has not yet been set. In July, K&H Partners of West Virginia applied for a permit to install an injection well off Athens County Road 63, which runs between Coolville and Torch. It already has one injection well in that area.
The county commissioners had previously written the Ohio Department of Natural Resources to request that ODNR hold a public hearing on K&H Partners’ pending permit application. Attached to that request was a list of more than two dozen concerns Athens County residents have raised about the K&H Partners application and injection wells in general.
Andrea Reik, a member of ACFAN, told the commissioners that ODNR received more than 100 comments about the pending permit application during a comment period that expired Sept. 9. She said that so far ODNR has not said whether it will hold the public hearing requested by the commissioners and others.
Mark Bruce, spokesman for ODNR, said Tuesday that the agency “continues to diligently review” the comments and objections that were received about the K&H Partners permit application.
“… The chief of the Division of Oil and Gas Resources Management will determine if the objections are relevant,” Bruce said.
A hearing by ODNR is required if the chief considers an objection to be relevant to issues of public health or safety or good conservation practices, or to have substance, according to the Ohio Administrative Code.
Absent word from ODNR on a public hearing, Reik and other members of ACFAN asked the commissioners to hold a public meeting to allow people to raise their concerns.
“I think that it is important that people have a forum where people can express their concerns,” Commission President Lenny Eliason said regarding why he supported having a public meeting.
Representatives of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, ODNR, the county’s congressional delegation, the well operators and the public will be invited to the meeting, according to the commissioners.
Members of ACFAN said they want the United States EPA to take back injection well oversight in Ohio, which the EPA gave to the state in 1983. According to ACFAN, the U.S EPA has more stringent permitting standards.
The public meeting hosted by the commissioners also will be an opportunity for people to comment on the Ginsberg injection well, located on Ladd Ridge Road.
Earlier this month, the commissioners approved a resolution asking ODNR to shut down the well. The resolution asserts that the Ginsberg well “has a 25-year history of violations, well failures, notices to be shut down and incomplete inspection reports.”