Letter to the Editor

To the Editor:

interpreted houses will be open for viewing.

Eckley’s Patchtown Festival will run on Saturday, June 17, from 10 a.m. until 5 p.m. Admission to the event is $10/adult, $9/senior, and $8/youth. Children under 3 enter for free.

Eckley Miners’ Village is committed to preserving and interpreting the lives and culture of people from around the world who came to Northeastern Pennsylvania to mine anthracite coal and fuel America’s early industrial might. The village is located in Foster Township, Luzerne County, three miles south of Freeland. Eckley is administered by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, the Commonwealth’s official heritage agency. Eckley’s open hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Thursday through Sunday. For more information, visit Eckley Miners’ Village onlineor follow us on Facebook or Instagram.

This is in response to your thoughtful editorial of May 25.

Our legislatures the past fifteen years should be hanging heads in shame. Voters who elected them should also share the blame for schools laying off teachers and eliminating librarians as well as art and music teachers.

PA is the SAUDI ARABIA of natural gas production in the United States. Texas is number 1 in natural gas just as the US is number 1 by far in oil production. The Saudis are second in oil like PA is second in natural gas production.

Why are PA taxpayers 47th out of 50 states in supporting public schools? Why are PA college students burdened by the second highest average student college debt? Simple answer: Failure to impose a resource extraction tax on Marcellus Shale.

Just like the robber Coal Barons did for over a century, our PA Common natural resources are being plundered for private gain.

Treating citizens like dupes, the mines were emptied of coal like the Marcellus natural gas is currently being stolen tax free now.

One day soon, Marcellus out-of-state trillionaires will leave us with uncapped wells, like Coal Barons left us with a century of polluted acid mine water and giant strippings piled with slag.

And not ONE CENT resource extraction tax on Marcellus Shale has been paid into the General Fund to restore public education/ public college support that moved PA from 3rd highest in 1970 to 47th in the US in last 50 years. Penn State has the highest tuition of any land grant university. Why?

Instead of taking and prospering from God’s natural and coal gifts to us, instead of acting like a real COMMONwealth, instead of doing what ALL the other 49 states have done for a century. PA has given away at minimum 30 BILLION tax dollars (at Texas’extraction tax rate) in 15 years to the Marcellus drillers. And we are STILL doing it.

Governors Wolf and Rendell tried for 12 years to convince a GOP majority legislature to pass a Marcellus extraction tax. They laughed and instead set up a “fee” stipend to pay local governments for the destroyed roads, forests, and streams Marcellus drilling caused. Not one cent general funding for schools.

So, here we fester with a tax free and private profit Saudi Arabian size natural gas resource extraction enabled by corrupt cooperation of the GOP going on under our noses while we fire teachers and librarians in PA. (Like coal, once the natural gas is extracted, it is gone forever.)

We also ignore the fact our pitifully low and regressive state income tax sits at 3 per cent while fixed income seniors fund the schools. Why do PA residents put up with being humiliated as the only state to NOT tax resource extraction? For 200 years and counting...

Dave Panckeri Weatherly