After much heated debate and delay, the Village of Oxford Board of Trustees voted 4-1 last night in favor of a change in the municipal zoning ordinance that clarifies a prohibition against gas exploration, extraction, and disposal, establishing the first fracking moratorium in Chenango County.

There are a number of these local holds on fracking (some bans, some moratoriums) across the state, many of which have been passed in communities that aren’t located on top of the Marcellus and/or Utica shales and therefore are in no danger of seeing drilling anytime soon.

These actions have so far withstood legal challenges, although the matter remains tied up in court.

Chenango County is in the Southern Tier, and is one of of a handful of counties mentioned last summer as part of a limited fracking plan floated to the New York Times by a senior official at the Department of Environmental Conservation. According to that proposal, communities that do not want to play host to the controversial natural gas drilling process would not be forced to do so.

Village of Oxford officials have been contemplating this ban since last July, and the debate has apparently been quite contentious at times. They were poised to vote in December, but then delayed things at the last minute due to the threat of legal action by a pro-fracking group.

According to a press release sent by an organization called the Concerned Residents of Oxford,  Mayor Stark (who voted “yes” on the ban, received over 300 letters from local residents urging him to enact a moratorium. In addition, a petition yielded has so far yielded 1,052 signatures for a townwide moratorium on fracking.

After the vote, Stark urged everyone involved in this local debate to “please seek common ground,” which seems much easier said than done if you’ve been following this issue through its many ups and downs over the past four+ years.

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