Craig Stevens and Vera Scroggins from Susquehanna County, PA have agreed to come to our Town Board Meeting this Monday, March 12th at 6:30 pm daylight savings time at the Firehouse. They will have to drive an hour and a half to speak for the unreasonably short time of 5 minutes each. Supervisor Jerry Kreiner is saying that he will give them no longer than anyone else during the public comment period.

I told him how far they would be driving and he said, fair is fair. But that’s not fair! They’ve seen far more than the rest of us. They have seen the contaminations in Dimock courtesy of Cabot Oil and Gas, the blowouts of drilling mud into a Class A trout creek running through Craig’s property by Laser and now they’re witnessing water well contaminations in Franklin Township, PA, courtesy of Williams Production.

Look at Vera’s video below (Citizens Speak Up About Contaminated Water in Franklin Twp., Pa. ) of the Franklin town board meeting where 5 or 6 people say that they have high pressure methane and heavy metals in their water since Williams started drilling in the area. Of course Williams is denying any responsibility! This is extremely relevant to every town in New York State that has not yet established a ban or at least a moratorium!

We need a big turnout to thank these 2 generous PA fractivists for coming so far to help us as they did for Vestal http://vimeo.com/37314080 and we need to push Supervisor Kreiner and the Board to vote for a moratorium right then and there, that night without further delay. No more stalling. They’ve listened to our informational testimony and they’ve accepted our over 600 petition signatures for the last 6 months and so far they’ve remained inscrutable. But their comments seem to be slowly evolving from skepticism to attentive sympathy. They paid attention when David Slottje made his riveting presentation to them at the last meeting as well they should have.

Now we need to urge them to take positive action Monday night at the Board Meeting, Plymouth Firehouse, 6:30 pm daylight savings time, before Cuomo and the DEC start granting shale gas permits. Our efforts need to be regional as well as town by town. I think there was real value in out-of-towners speaking at the Sidney Hearing and at our Plymouth Board Meeting last month and I hope local residents as well as out-of-towners will come again.

But please don’t forward this to an open listserve. The pro-gassers’ comments are always lacking in accurate information and are always a waste of time. Hope to see you there. Thank you.

Peter Hudiburg

We know that this domain belonged to someone else last year and we cannot remember who it was, so we certainly do not know why it was suddenly found to be available. So today Plymouth Internet Services has acquired the ChenangoNY.Net domain name and put up a slick new Drupal website in order to help promote our community and, at the same time, our own business. It is our hope that local Chenango County businesses take notice, and realize that they don't need to mortgage their properties in order to afford an attractive and functional website.