02/16/2009 Meeting Minutes - Laserfiche WebLink

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Regular Council Meeting Minutes 2-16-09 Page 4 would be happy to meet but he wants the residents to get a homework assignment. We will provide information. We will try to condense it and digest it. We will try to convene and bring people along that we think can answer the questions that you have. The fundamental issues though as we understand them are we can't control where it goes. We can regulate to a very limited extent how it goes in. Mayor Rinker does not know if some of you know that there are wells right now that have been going in for the last several montlis over the course of the past year or.so on Beta. Some of them are operational. They are right there, right in front yards of those properties on Beta. A lot of people wouldn't even know it. Mayor Rinker thinks everyone recognizes there is a big difference between a residential use and a commercial use when it comes in to a residential area as the State has allowed and the assemblage of property has been promoted in order to do this and it's individual property owners who sign off on this. For the people in Gates Mills that are alarmed, they have to look to their neighbors, because their neighbors are the ones signing those leases. This past suminer when it became evident to us that at least one site on Bonnieview, a vacant lot, had been targeted as "the drilling site", and that the other 20 acres needed to be collected were about to be collected and we were told in effect that that would be the location, for the residents that live on Bonnieview, Beech Hill, Glenview that were very concerned about that, they were very upset. They were upset with us that this might be happening, that we needed to do something about it. We had a very charged meeting in July with a lot of questions and answers between prospective drillers who are in the audience tonight and a lot of those residents. At that point we suggested maybe what we can do is we can enter into a non-drilling lease. But Mayor Rinker said our concern then is we may be able to relocate or soften the blow of this particular drilling site in this particular neighborhood, but our question would be would we be sending it closer to another neighborhood? Mayor Rinker pointed out it might even be Hanover Woods. He said he would expect at some point we might hear from Hanover Woods if that were to be the case. That was just even raising the question. It was shortly after that that we put it on to the agendas and we had these on Caucus and Council agendas, non-drilling leases. The other location, we were aware there was another drilling site on a property on SOM up across from Fisher's Tavern, the Hejcl property. Because we have land holdings in that area, we were also approached to sign non-drilling leases. One of the underpinnings of this has been that if we were to enter into a lease, we would want to make sure we control the drilling process, the operation process as a matter of contract as much as possible. We would try to control how it gets installed and how it gets maintained. We felt we probably had the best leverage as a landowner not necessarily as a government but as a landowner because it's the landowner that has the superior negotiating rights in this way. As a government, if we could do it mindful of our constituency, that's what we have been studying. We routed it through Planning and Zoning. They again had very extensive discussions on these points. They had very specific recommendations that Council has looked at. They got feedback from our Law Director, a memo to that effect. These are some of the things that Mayor Rinker would like to make available to you in advance of a meeting that we have.