Florida cities and counties aren’t waiting on lawmakers to draw new limits on oil and gas development. Several of them have passed resolutions against fracking, and Tallahassee has join them.
The Tallahassee city commission’s resolution against fracking is a move supported by environmentalists like ReThink Energy’s Kim Ross. She says it’s an environmental and economic issue.
“Even though no one is going to frack in Lake Ella, when things happen in our state people look at Florida and say, ‘I don’t want to go to Florida, they don’t say, “I don’t want to go to Naples where fracking occurred’, they don’t say, I don’t want to go to Florida because I’m concerned about the water quality’," Ross says.
The resolution was sponsored by Tallahassee City Commissioner Nancy Miller.
Tallahassee is the seventh municipality to state its opposition to fracking. The Madison County Commission approved similar language Wednesday Morning, and the Leon County Commission approved its version of the resolution Tuesday. The move is a response to an unauthorized drilling procedure that occurred last year in Collier County. There are proposals pending in the legislature to update the state’s oil and gas development laws and ban the procedure.