The state’s Independent Fiscal Office is offering some troubling news. Projections for next year’s disbursements of natural gas impact fee revenues may be $94 million to $95 million less than the disbursements this year — which, if it pans out, would be the largest year-to-year decline yet. Reporting by The Center Square’s Anthony Hennen, published in Thursday’s Sun-Gazette, cites several factors expected to account for the decline.

The decline in the price of natural gas is at least as much — likely even more — of a blessing than a curse. Lower natural gas prices will help families and businesses afford to heat their homes and, where natural gas is used to generate electricity, reduce power bills.

While it may force municipalities in our region to pare back some projects, curtailing runaway energy costs is frankly more important. But producers also tell Hennen and other Center Square reporters that limited pipeline capacity is holding the industry’s potential back. Without the ability to move natural gas effectively, efforts at drilling new wells also have fallen.

There is no silver lining to this: An affordable source of energy — cleaner than coal, with less dangerous waste than nuclear and more technologically feasible at this point in time than solar and wind — is stymied from reaching markets, heating our homes and businesses, generating revenue for our neighborhoods and communities and creating jobs.

We hope our state government can see this looming risk of a decline in impact fee revenues as a wake-up call. We hope they will reform our permitting processes, remove unreasonable obstacles to pipeline construction and allow an industry whose contributions to our region have been richly multifaceted to once again flourish.

— Williamsport Sun-Gazette