Finding Ulysses

If you want to understand what’s going on right now with local government in the Town of Ulysses, the one place you absolutely should not go is the web site of the Town of the Ulysses. Although we Ulysses residents pay for both a Town Clerk and a Deputy Town Clerk, online meeting minutes to tell us what the Town Board is doing on our behalf are more than two months out of date.

No, if you want a clue about the political goings-on with the Ulysses Town Board, you’ll have to go to a report recently assembled by Allen Carstensen. He provides the kind of information about what happens at board meetings that never makes it into the official minutes.

I’ll be discussing many of the items Carstensen has documented in the coming days, but for this evening, I want to focus on one of the most timely issues for our town: The arrival of natural gas drilling in Ulysses.

I’ll risk offending some here in Ulysses by stating that whether a person decides to allow natural gas drilling on their land indicates a great deal about how they feel about their neighbors and their community. The reason is hydraulic fracturing (fracking), the drilling technique that has to be used in the Marcellus Shale, the geological formation underneath our town from which natural gas companies hope to extract their product. Fracking requires the use of large amounts of ground water, taking that water, and mixing it with a secret group of chemicals. That mixture is then pumped into the ground. When the process is over, the drilling company removes as much of the fracking fluid as it can, and then has to dispose of the fluid as toxic waste.

Here’s what we learn from Allen Carstensen’s report: At the last Town Board meeting, Ulysses Supervisor Doug Austic admitted that he has signed a lease with a natural gas drilling company, allowing them to perform fracking on his property.

Connect the dots to an old story: Doug Austic spent much of this decade trying to push through approval for Water District 5, a plan to construct water pipes snaking across the countryside throughout Ulysses – and to Doug Austic’s own property.

At the time, Supervisor Austic said that he was promoting Water District 5, because he hated the idea that some landowners in Ulysses might have poor drinking water. However, Austic has personally agreed to take part in a drilling project that involves taking huge amounts of our Ulysses water, mixing it with a bunch of secret chemicals that make it into toxic waste, and pumping it back into the ground.

It’s hoped that this fracking fluid isn’t spilled, doesn’t leak into groundwater, and doesn’t cause problems in some other way. It’s hoped that the fracking process doesn’t cause earthquakes or lead a neighbor’s house to explode. But, hey, no one can say for sure what will happen. We’ll just cross our fingers. Maybe it will all turn out fine.

Property owners like Doug Austic may see some profit – or they may just see drilling company trucks running roughshod over their land without a penny of income. However, these property owners have neighbors who aren’t choosing to go along with the natural gas drilling plans. Those neighbors most certainly won’t be seeing any profit, but their homes and land will be put at risk.

So, it’s not very gentle of me to say this, but I don’t think it’s a very neighborly thing for someone to sign a for-profit lease to allow drilling companies to go prospecting for natural gas on one’s land, when the likely impacts on one’s neighbors are still unknown. For the Supervisor of our Town to engage in such behavior seems particularly disappointing, especially when that Supervisor has been pushing a gigantic water program his neighbors would pay for, which just so happens to lead straight to his own personal profit.

In Mr. Austic’s favor is the fact that he signed the drilling lease on his land 15 years ago, not as a part of the recent push for drilling here. Some will say that 15 years ago, the environmental impacts of natural gas drilling weren’t known. Isn’t that still a problem, though? Should we enter into any kind of radical exploitation of our properties before we understand what the impacts will be?