Giving away the store

The Town of Bethel’s recent action in ceding the town road leading to Toronto Reservoir to Woodstone Companies has some troubling features.

We don’t necessarily fault the town, which has been struggling with its highway costs in recent years, for giving away a road that they don’t feel they have the funds to repair—especially since, as noted by board member Richard Crumley, it currently leads to nowhere. But of course, the reason it leads to nowhere is that the private company to which it is being given refuses to give the public the right of access to the reservoir demanded by Federal regulations. And with Woodstone Companies’ heavy construction vehicles comprising the bulk of the traffic on the road over the past few years, it could be argued that they’ve made the primary contribution recently to its dilapidation.

There are also concerns that the giveaway of the road may prejudice the lawsuit currently in progress over those rights. As long as the town owned at least part of the access road, and paid for the maintenance, the argument that the public ought to be allowed to use the whole thing was more persuasive.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of this particular case, the privatization of the Toronto Reservoir access road points to a larger phenomenon that is occurring nationally: the exploitation of public resources by private companies, without any yield or benefit to the public that, in theory, owns them. Timber from Federal lands is sold below cost to lumber companies that then sell it at a hefty profit. The public gets none of that profit; in fact, since the Federal government has to pay the costs of managing the land and building roads for the logging companies, it is estimated that taxpayers subsidize the logging industry to the tune of $1 billion a year. Mining companies can buy patents on Federal land that allow them to use it as they choose for pennies on the dollar—they don’t even have to mine it, and can build a casino or a factory or residential real estate if they prefer. In one recent deal, Phelps Dodge obtained 155 acres at $5 an acre, in an area where one-tenth of an acre was selling for $100,000.

In Pennsylvania, we see the same phenomenon in the state’s leasing of public forestland to natural gas drilling companies. Maybe state officials responsible for this decision should have paid more attention to the habitat fragmentation and pollution that has resulted from the gas drilling that has been going on for years in the Allegheny National Forest in the northwest of the state, where once again, public land is being despoiled for private gain.

Closer to home, the case of the Bethel road also raises a question with regard to the prospective natural gas drilling activity coming to our own area. How will our roads stand up to the constant heavy vehicle traffic? Who will be expected to pay? Is there some way we can recapture the cost in fees and taxes, or is this yet another way in which a small group of private companies and individuals get to dance while the public pays the piper?

One thing you can be sure of is that the gas companies will not, as Woodstone has done in the Bethel case, agree to take over and maintain our roads after they’re done pulverizing them. Local property owners’ associations are already working on getting the best deals for themselves from the gas drilling companies. Maybe it’s time for local municipalities to do the same: figure out what kind of a hit they’re going to have to take on their infrastructure and figure out how the public can recover as much of the costs as possible.

Dr. Punnybone

One-Eyed Jocks