COLUMBUS, Ohio – A pair of Republican state lawmakers is pushing for Ohio’s shale-gas rich counties to get a portion of the money generated from a proposed tax hike on oil and gas drillers.
State Reps. Jay Hottinger of Newark and Al Landis of Dover said in a statement Thursday that local communities must be compensated for road, bridge and infrastructure impacts from the shale boom.
A proposal moving through the Legislature calls for severance-tax increases of 1 percent, then 2 percent, on horizontally drilled wells with proceeds funding a statewide income-tax cut.
Hottinger said county funds should be set aside first.
“Bottom line is that clearly the impacted counties should benefit the most from any revenues generated,” Hottinger said. He also said the state should not discourage the industry with burdensome taxes.
The liberal police group Policy Matters Ohio has also criticized the original bill for excluding hydraulic fracturing wells from the Commercial Activity Tax and creating “tax cuts favoring the most affluent Ohioans rather than filling revenue gaps.”
The new package would generate an estimated $2 billion over 10 years and replaces a scuttled tax plan proposed last year by Gov. John Kasich.
The measure also proposes spending some of the revenue on thousands of orphaned wells and on regulation.