Tomorrow night Rep. Doyle Heffley is holding a “Town Hall” at the Lehigh Township municipal building. I plan on being there. I plan on being polite, but I have a handout with the following message:
HB 1576, sponsored by Rep. Jeff Pyle (R-Indiana County) applies to the Game Commission, the Fish and Boat Commission, and the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, which now have the statutory authority to list threatened or endangered species in our state.
The bill would immediately eliminate hundreds of species of special concern from environmental permit review. Those species have been found to be rare in Pennsylvania and are tracked to prevent them from becoming endangered.
The bill threatens to cost Pennsylvania millions of dollars in grants from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Secondly, the bill says agencies must look at the entire range of a species, not just in Pennsylvania. If a species has 100 individuals in Ohio and only 20 in Pennsylvania, the bill would not protect the species in Pennsylvania. In addition, the bill would require a new database of species, even though we already have one. The bill would also provide public information as to where endangered species are located, allowing bad-intentioned people to bring them harm.
The Fish and Boat Commission and the Game Commission are among the best agencies in the state, and they are doing an excellent job. The system is not broken. It doesn’t need to be “fixed.”
I’ll let you know how things go.
Gee, do you think the fracking industry wants this to happen?
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