The county clerk’s office in the hundred twenty one
year old Wayne County Courthouse at 300 West Main Street, Fairfield, Illinois,
270 miles south of Chicago, is flooded with laptop toting strangers speaking in
whispers, and the pickup trucks of local farmers have been displaced from the
courthouse parking lot by fancy sports cars and late model imports with out of
state plates. Local farmers have been offered as much as $220,000.00 per year
for leasing the mineral rights beneath their fields, without so much as a
single ear of corn on their acreage being disturbed. Those laptop toting
carpetbaggers have spent as much as $100 million in the southeastern Illinois
area leasing the right to harvest natural gas from the rock strata 4,000 feet
below the Great Plains using horizontal fracking technology.
Part of the Obama Administration’s “all of the
above” energy independence strategy, shale gas recovery is expected to produce
a million new manufacturing jobs in the U. S. by 2025, according to
PricewaterhouseCoopers industrial products leader Robert McCutcheon. With the
White House conceding by executive order that state governments are the primary
regulators of fracking policies, Illinois legislators are attempting to pass
regulatory legislation before the end of the current session – with luck before
horizontal fracking begins on the leases already negotiated downstate.
Wayne County Clerk Glenda young says she’s “a
little bit scared” of large scale fracking in the neighborhood, and Wayne
County Press editorials have opposed the development of “babe busses” to
shuttle gas workers from housing developments to strip clubs which have
followed the birth of fracking operations in some North Dakota rural gas
fields. On the other hand, a mineral rights lease producing a quarter million a
year is difficult for corn farmers to turn down. Echoing the sentiments of many
Wayne County residents who favor the employment and money fracking can bring to
their town, Bud Vaught, manager of Mac’s Billiards in Fairfield sums up the
situation thusly: “Until they screw up and do something wrong, I’m going to
give them the benefit of the doubt.”
