We’re getting drilled in Pennsylvania

Will Bunch on Gov. Tom Corbett’s new budget proposal:

If there was a moral to the story that Gov. Corbett spun Tuesday in his much-anticipated, first-ever budget talk, it was that all wealth is not viewed equally – at least not when it comes to Corbett’s notions about bailing Pennsylvania out of its $4 billion budget hole.

To middle-class state employees, to upwardly mobile college students at Pennsylvania-funded universities, to the working poor who’ve looked to Harrisburg for affordable health insurance, the newly inaugurated governor sent out more sacrifice signals yesterday than a third-base coach on a built-for-speed baseball team. He even urged that teachers take a one-year pay freeze — an issue not under his direct control.

“If government is here to share the taxpayer’s wealth then everyone needs to share in the sacrifice,” said the new governor, whose relaxed posture and shock of white hair threw off an aura of imperial calm, even as he metaphorically jabbed a budget dagger so sharp that would have made Caligula proud. “Educators, Pennsylvanians await your decision.”

But there’s another group that’s tapping into big-time wealth – a buried treasure right here in Pennsylvania — that isn’t facing those kinds of tough decision that causes a pay-frozen schoolteacher’s family to cut back on groceries or cancel a weekend down the shore.

That would be the economically booming, mostly out-of-state natural gas companies and their multi-millionaire CEOs, who continue to rapidly expand their aggressive form of drilling known as hydrofracking, or simply “fracking,” across large swaths of upstate Pennsylvania. The companies take in hundreds of millions of dollars without paying any dedicated Pennsylvania tax — even as such levies are imposed in the other 14 of the top 15 gas-producing states, even in red-state bastions of free-market libertarianism like Dick Cheney’s native Wyoming and George W. Bush’s Texas.

In a remarkable coincidence, 2010 gubernatorial candidate Corbett received a whopping $835,720 from oil-and-natural gas interests, including his largest single contributor – Marcellus Shale driller Terry Pegula and his wife Kim, who gave $305,000 to the Republican’s campaign at the same time Pegula was selling his exploration firm to Royal Dutch Shell and pocketing a $3 billion check. Indeed, Corbett’s career in elective Pennsylvania politics was launched in 2004 when an Oklahoma gas driller – Aubrey McClendon of Chesapeake Energy – funneled most of the dollars for an eye-popping $480,000 donation that went to Corbett’s attorney general campaign from an obscure GOP fund.

There’s a saying in politics that a budget is really a political document, and that was never truer than yesterday, as Corbett made it clear he believes in a conservative, tea-party-flavored philosophy that sees middle-income public employees like teachers as feeding too well at the taxpayer trough and government’s main role for big business is to get the heck out of the way, that – in the governor’s own words on gas drilling- “[L]imited government means not mistaking someone else’s property for your own.” Longtime political scientist and pundit G. Terry Madonna of Franklin and Marshall College sees Corbett on the road to becoming the most radical Keystone State governor in our lifetime, and after yesterday it’s hard to disagree.

“Their philosophy is that the public sector is fat and bloated,” said Madonna, who said he was stunned by the governor’s scheme to cut some $625 million in funding – which is more than half – for 14 state-owned colleges and universities and state-backed schools like Temple, Penn State and Pitt.

But what has many folks surprised is the other side of the equation: Corbett’s steadfast opposition to any kind of tax on the state’s fastest-growing industry, the drilling for natural gas buried under the Marcellus Shale formation that thanks to new drilling technology has quickly become a more-than-$2-billion-a-year enterprise, centered in Pennsylvania. Although Corbett was elected on a no-new-taxes pledge, several polls have shown that about 60 percent of Pennsylvanians would still support taxing the natural gas drillers at a rate similar to the other energy-producing states.

Several lawmakers – such as Democratic state Rep. Greg Vitali of Delaware County – are pushing for exactly that : A Pennsylvania severance tax on gas production just a tad lower than the rate charged in neighboring West Virginia, which would bring in estimated $200 million in revenue in the coming fiscal year and would rise to an estimated $400 million annually as drilling increases.

“Wealthy drillers are making tons of money while dramatically changing the character of the countryside – and they ought to pay their fair share,” Vitali said. “It’s absolute insanity. It’s absolutely indefensible.”