06/15/2009 Meeting Minutes - Laserfiche WebLink

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Regular Council Meeting Minutes 6-15-09 Page 27 access, you need an accountable person. You need to be able to have fire safety get there. Your fire safety needs training. There was a time when the industry provided funding for fire training in oil and gas. There was a place in Wooster that had special fire training. The problem was it cost you money to go get the training. The industry ought to belly up to the bar and provide funding. Not just the funding for training, you have the overtime and shipping them down. We are going to work on that aspect as well. Senator Grendell would be glad to answer questions. He will leave you with one thought. House Bill 278 allegedly took away your local control, although nobody's fully tested that out completely. There's a control that you have and Senator Grendell does not think it is in House Bill 278, you may want to have your law department look at it, and that's controlling the guys who knock on the doors and solicit the oil and gas leases themselves. Senator Grendell has a pet peeve with these folks knocking on the doors and telling people that this is the Ohio lease form. It's not. An oil and gas lease is a negotiable document. There's no set approved form. There's no mandatory form. You can negotiate your rights, require more distance. You can require screening. We need an educated populous to understand that the guy at the door is a slick real estate or oil and gas agent and is not telling them everything they need to know before they put the ink on a lease. Senator Grendell thinks the community could step in there. You can require that these agents hopefully can be registered in the city, so that you don't just have strangers floating around. Maybe have a required form that they have to give your residents when they knock on the door and offer and explain to them what the rights of your citizens are in this process both as to signing of a lease, negotiating a lease and mandatory pooling. You might be able to, if you can't solve the ultimate problem, at least try to get in front of the problem by helping educating your residents and putting some restrictions on these folks who are misleading some residents into signing leases that are not in their best interests or being buffaloed into signing leases or being told that there is only one lease form and frankly on the mandatory pooling being told if you don't sign this lease, the government is going to take it from you. There is a process for mandatory pooling with appeals and granted ODNR's track record is not great on this, Senator Grendell would suggest that until we can fix House Bi11278, an area you may want to explore is how you can get these folks who are getting the leases signed under some sort of control and registration and notification process. House Bi11278 doesn't touch that at all. It may be a way for you to exercise some protective care. Senator Grendell has suggested this to Highland Heights and Mayfield Heights and Gates Mills. Your law departments may want to share some thoughts and see if there is some place there you can get in front of the process. If you can't stop it, at least make it a little fairer for the people out there. Mayor Rinker asked if there has been any discussion as far as allowing communities to intervene at the point of application and at least demonstrate unique problems. For example in Bainbridge where you don't have a public water system, they should be able to impose either a greater set of criteria, some type of evidentiary process.