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As Governor Cuomo pushes to lift the ban on hydraulic fracking local municipalities have become active in putting laws and policies into place that will best protect residents and lands.  While the towns of Dryden and Ithaca and others have been proactive in redefining zoning and other regulations that could potentially ban fracking within their borders, Lansing has been behind in dealing with the issue.  At just about every meeting this year the Lansing Town Board has been asked what they are doing about it, and this month was no exception.

"I think it is very time critical, particularly since we have this 60 day consultation period," said resident Rachel Bean.  "Conceivably gas drilling could go ahead as early as 2012.  So there's not much of a time window to make changes or clarifications in the regulations that are within the Town Of Lansing's control before you have to start dealing with requests for gas drilling."

Lansing Supervisor Scott Pinney says the board has been watching what other towns are doing, and has discussed putting together a committee to come up with recommendations for the board to take action on.  But there has been no activity by town officials yet.

"The board has really paid attention to what other towns are doing," he said.  "There have been lots fo discussions on this in different meetings.  Board members have attended seminars.  As we have watched other towns and are learning from everybody else we've had a gas committee before and that kind of died out as gas drilling left New York State for a while.  Now is the time to get that committee working again to try to protect our natural areas and look at what we can do to protect the Town Of Lansing.  We're ready to move forward with that."

Councilwoman Kathy Miller, who will be the liaison to that committee, says the Town isn't quite ready to move forward, because it is hard to get people to serve especially during this time of year when everyone is on vacation.  She said she plans to attend a couple of information sessions in August, then assemble the committee in September.

"There are a number of people who have expressed an interest in being on that committee," she said.  "Some of them have an awful lot of knowledge.  I'm really quite pleased with that.  As Scott said a lot of towns have done work already, so we can kind of piggy-back.  There's no sense in reinventing the wheel.  They have a lot of good things.  We'll have to see what we have on the books that we can tweak or change.  I think Lansing may have some things already in place that are good.

Miller says she hopes to post information about what the committee comes up with on the Town Web site, and as liaison to the committee she will report at board meetings.

"Anything that the committee will propose will come back to the board," she said.

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