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Landowners Feel Ignored
By David Hedges, Publisher
www.thetimesrecord.net
John and Sally Snyder had big plans for the property when they bought the land near their home on Little Pigeon Road.
Unfortunately, so did someone else.
The piece of ground where they planned to build a home is now home to a gas well instead.
"They drilled it exactly where we wanted to build the house," Sally Snyder said.
Sally, whose mother, Emogene Helmick, lives next door, grew up in the Pigeon area. Her father, Bevie, died 10 years ago.
She graduated from Spencer High School and met John, a member of the first graduating class at Parkersburg South High School, and they were married a year after he returned from Vietnam in 1972.
He went to work in Toledo, Ohio, for a short time, but missed his West Virginia roots.
He returned home after landing a job with Corning in Parkersburg, where he worked while taking night classes at Parkersburg Community College. She worked at the Bureau of Public Debt.
Still, they longed for a more rural lifestyle.
"The whole time we were in Parkersburg, every weekend we came down to her mom's place," John said.
"We were country people living in the city," Sally said.
John was eventually transferred to New York state, but the couple always had dreams of returning to West Virginia.
In 1980 they bought property beside her parents, with plans of one day retiring there.
John still recalls some advice his father gave him.
"My dad always said, 'never buy land in West Virginia that doesn't have the mineral rights with it'," he said. "I told him, 'there isn't any land left in West Virginia that doesn't have the mineral rights severed.'"
The property they bought had the minerals rights severed in 1914.
Their plans for returning home were moved up by several years. After 19 years with the same company, John was laid off in 1993.
"I was 43 and had no job," he said. "We had this property and came down here and started working on a house."
John eventually went to work for the U.S. Postal Service processing and distribution center at Southridge while his wife works as a pre-school aide in Charleston.
Before John was laid off by Corning, the family had grown to include a son, Peter, now an engineering student at WVU, and a daughter, Chloe, a senior at Charleston Catholic High School.
The property they bought was to be for their son's home. It had a road with a gate and level building site. The couple installed water and gas lines and put up a mailbox.
John said it was the ideal home site, on a secluded dead-end road just three miles from the interstate.
"It's not every place where you can open your window and hear a running stream," he said.
A natural gas drilling company from a nearby county changed those plans.
The company put a gate right next to theirs, and turned the 15-foot driveway into a 50-foot wide access road for heavy drilling equipment. They removed all the surrounding trees in a process known as "daylighting."
The trees were shoved over the hill, left to rot on the property.
In addition to the well, there is a collection tank, wellhead piping and meter base and 2,400 feet of pipeline running through the site.
The gas and water lines the Snyders installed are now severed and sticking out of the ground.
The couple has complained, but the state inspector assigned to this area told him he was powerless to do anything. "He said he couldn't tell them to do anything. He can only suggest," John said.
Eight months before the well was drilled, the Snyders said they showed the company where they planned to build.
"That's exactly where they put the well," John said.
"You could never put a structure there now," Sally added. "We're just kind of in limbo now."
After being notified in August 2006 that the company had filed for a drilling permit, the Snyders had 15 days to respond.
They did. Snyder said the W.Va. Division of Environmental Protection took their comments, faxed them to the drilling company and a week later approved the permit.
They asked for a hearing, and got none. Under current state law, none is required.
Now the gas well sits on the building site at the end of the road.
The couple contacted an attorney in Grantsville and took the company to court, filing a suit in September of that year.
In December, a hearing was held before Roane Circuit Judge Tom Evans.
One year after the suit was filed, in September 2007, Evans dismissed the case. Since it involved a state agency, it should have been filed in Kanawha County, Snyder said. It cost him a year and $6,000 in legal fees to find that out.
"I used to think the system was fair," Snyder said. "But we don't have the funds to take advantage of the system the way the drillers do. They just pass it off as a cost of doing business."
With one child in college and another about to start, Snyder says he doesn't have the money to file another suit. He says he has tried to negotiate with the company, but without success.
"They won't negotiate," he said. "They offered $2,000 for everything they have done to our property."
His experiences are why Snyder is supporting a surface owners' bill of rights.
Dave McMahon, a public-interest lawyer working with the newly formed W.Va. Surface Owners' Rights Organization, said the bill would require drillers give notice before going onto someone's land to survey for a well site, access road or pipeline. It would also base compensation for damages on the market value of the land, instead of its current use.
Most importantly, it would encourage drillers and landowners to meet face-to-face and work together to reach an agreement on well locations and access roads.
McMahon says the deck is stacked in favor of the drillers, and against the surface owners.
He says this is only the beginning. Just a few years ago, the state issued around 900 drilling permits. In 2007, the number exceeded 3,000.
The oil and gas industry is opposed to the legislation, which comes as no surprise. What did surprise Snyder is that the W.Va. County Commissioners Association has also come out against the bill. The association said that a more cumbersome permitting process could have a negative impact on economic development.
Last year, the counties collected $130 million in property tax revenues from oil and gas operations, according to figures from the W.Va. Oil and Natural Gas Association.
The commissioners' group heard from oil and gas officials before taking their stand, but not from representatives of the surface owners' group.
Snyder contacted the county commissioner who represents his district. In addition to being a commissioner, Rodney Cox also works for an oil and gas company in Charleston.
Cox sent Snyder a response, saying he agreed with the commissioners' association stand.
"It sounds like we need to enforce the rules we have, not create additional requirements," Cox responded.
Snyder notes that the Roane County Commission supports the commissioners' association with his tax dollars, but without considering the opinions of thousands of surface owners in the county.
"We can't use this property, but we're still going to be paying taxes on it," Snyder said. "Then Rodney and the county commission will be using our tax dollars to defeat the surface owners' bills of rights.
"Where's the justice?" he asked.
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