Town says, "frack you" to Anschutz

Phillip Anschutz, bankrolled the anti-public school  propaganda film, Waiting for Superman. Now he's financing another film glorifying the so called, "parent trigger", a law which gives a group of parents the power to fire all their school's teachers and hand it over to a private management company. 20th Century Fox is preparing a September release for “Won’t Back Down” starring Viola Davis and Maggie Gyllenhaal. 

Anschutz is a far right-wing, evangelical billionaire who inherited his fortune from his father's oil business. He is also media mogul, publisher of the Weekly Standard, the S.F. Examiner, and owner of L.A.'s Staples Center. He was also the force behind California's anti-gay initiative. 

But his biggest profits come from his energy interests. He's the owner of Anschutz Exploration Corporation, a Colorado driller with 22,200 acres under lease in the town of Dryden, N.Y. where Anschutz intends to do hydrofracking for natural gas, a process that poses a threat to the town's drinking water. 

But in a victory for opponents of fracking, a New York State judge ruled on Tuesday that Dryden can ban natural gas drilling within its boundaries. Responding to a suit by Anschutz, State Supreme Court Justice Phillip R. Rumsey ruled that state law does not preclude a municipality from using its power to regulate land use to ban oil and natural gas production. The ruling is the first in New York to affirm local powers in the controversy over drilling in the Marcellus Shale, a gas deposit under a large area of New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio.

“The communities targeted for drilling need the power to determine for themselves when, where and if fracking is permitted,” Katherine Nadeau, the water and natural resources program director for Environmental Advocates of New York, said in a statement. She said the ruling would energize “the dozens, if not hundreds, of cities and towns concerned with industrial gas drilling.” -- N.Y. Times