These LTE's originally provided by The Charleston Gazette  (Oct 5, Oct 6)

October 5, 2011

Drilling should be up to landowners

Editor:

I have sworn to support and defend our Constitution. I believe in our right to be free. A large part of that freedom is our right to own and have authority over our own land.

I am a landowner. My deed shows that I own 97.5 acres. I pay county taxes, and if I don't, the county will take all 97.5 acres from me. How then can government override my authority and grant an oil and gas company access to my land, allowing them to damage and take indefinite control of 15 to 20 of my 97.5 acres?

I acknowledge the oil and gas reserves were not included in my deed, but all 97.5 acres of the surface was.

From a constitutional perspective, I don't believe you can sever what's below the surface and deny the surface owner authority to control what happens on the surface.

Politicians have told me that the damage (severing minerals from property) has been done and you can't go back. That is false. When individuals owned slaves, we reversed it. When women were denied the right to vote, we reversed it. I believe the constitutional right to property ownership is violated when landowners are denied authority to say if, when, who or how a private company accesses their property. We are long overdue to reverse it.

If an oil and gas company wants to enter onto my 97.5 acres, I believe they must have my permission per the U.S. and West Virginia constitutions. Our forefathers rebelled against King George and his Quartering Act because private landowners refused to allow the king's soldiers to invade their property.

"We the people" have extended certain rights to our government representatives. I believe it violates the Constitution for government to take authority from landowners and give it to private companies.

Retired Lt. Col. Rick Humphreys

Mannington

October 6, 2011

Who's going to pay for more DEP staff?

Editor:

The swiftness with which DEP reacted to the gas industry's whining about increased permit fees is amazing. Secretary Randy Huffman now says DEP can make do with only $5,000 per initial well instead of $10,000.

Concerned citizens could not disagree more. We need more than a token few additional inspectors in the field to protect us. DEP is extremely understaffed and admits that current operations are not supervised or inspected on site at all unless there is a complaint. This is not DEP's fault, per se, but the fault of the overall process in not providing DEP with the funds necessary to do a thorough job.

At the first attempt to correct that situation, industry cries that they are unfairly being asked to pay for DEP's additional staff. So who does industry think should pay for it? They are using millions of gallons of our water, which belongs to the citizens of West Virginia, for free. What's an appropriate fee for taking and polluting 5 million gallons of water for every frack? If they complain about the permit fee, maybe we should charge them for the water. Oh, wait, they don't want to pay for that either.

Carol Warren

Webster Springs