The Left Foot January 7

By Vincent Smith, The Left Foot Host

This week on The Left Foot, hosts Vincent Smith and Zach Herbster begin the segment by congratulating Pittsburgh’s new mayor, Bill Peduto, on effectively becoming the city’s 60th president after being sworn in on Tuesday. With Ravenstahl leaving and Peduto taking the reins, a new era of Pittsburgh city politics has begun, and Vincent and Zach shall be watching the Peduto administration very closely in the coming weeks and months.

For the remainder of the show, the hosts discuss the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision to strike down Act 13, an act that was, in part, put in place to protect the state’s environment and wildlife from the harmful effects of fracking in the Marcellus Shale regions of Pennsylvania. The state courts believed that the act was not doing an efficient job. The decision, which caught the Corbett administration off-guard, claimed that the harmful effects of drilling called for added oversight and restructuring of the act entirely. The courts cited the state constitution amendment — Article 1 Section 27 — which states that “the people have a right to clean air, pure water, and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic and esthetic values of the environment.”

The Corbett administration, in return, asked for an appeal of the decision. Corbett’s General Counsel James D. Schultz said in a statement that “the Pennsylvania Supreme Court made its own sweeping factual findings regarding the impact of Act 13, none of which finds any support in the sparse and uneven factual record that was made before Commonwealth Court.”

Vince and Zach discuss the issues of this act in detail, while also attempting to predict what this means for the future of private energy companies in Pennsylvania.