Bd.Chair signs deal to allow drilling in municipal park w/out board knowledge

[Divernan]

This municipal board administers a community park for the municipalities of Ohio, Kilbuck, Ben Avon, Ben Avon Heights and Emsworth. The chairman of that board has been SECRETLY negotiating with a driller FOR OVER A YEAR and has signed an agreement to permit drilling in the park. THEN, ex post facto, he announced it to the Board and the Borough Solicitor. The Chairman clearly exceeded any authority he had to act as an agent for the Board and the agreement is invalid, ab initio, as we say in the law, meaning from its initiation. No wonder he didn't run the agreement past the borough solicitor. He would have been told it wasn't worth the paper it was written on. The drilling company's lawyer would have told the drillers the same thing.

I can just picture some macho drilling manager saying, "We don't need no stinking lawyers! It will be like taking candy from a baby!" Well, bucko, when it comes to executing valid legal contracts, you needed a lawyer this time around.

On top of that, we all know from our coverage of drilling here in the Pennsylvania forum what these wells would do to the parkland. Thousands of tanker truckloads of water hauled across the parkland - they'll have to put in paved roads; poisonous waste water from the fracking, fumes so bad that no one could stand them or would choose to expose their families/children to them, the real risk of explosions/fires. What a bloody nightmare. Chairman Gould should be tarred, feathered and run out of town tied to a pole!

Avonworth to discuss shale drilling in park tonight
Thursday, April 07, 2011


The Avonworth Municipal Authority is meeting tonight to discuss for the first time a Marcellus Shale gas drilling lease that members haven't seen but that its chairman has already signed with Energy US.According to a letter sent to board members by Authority Board Chairman Ed Gould, he executed agreements with the drilling company to meet a Mar. 31 deadline set by the company at a meeting with him on Mar. 29.

The letter emailed to board members Wednesday, but dated Apr. 1, doesn't say how much the authority is getting to sign the lease or what its royalty percentage will be.

In the one-page letter Mr. Gould writes that he has been part of ongoing discussions about a gas drilling lease in the park for more than a year and, when faced with the deadline by the company, signed the agreement after getting "a verbal commitment that there was a 30 day out without penalty clause."

"I executed the agreements to meet the deadline with the full understanding that we will take the next couple of weeks to do what we did not have time to do under normal circumstances," Mr. Gould wrote in the letter that was copied to the authority solicitor, Charles Means. He said a clause allowing the authority to opt out of the agreement was included in final agreement documents he received from the drilling company.





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