Pennsylvania Independent Oil & Gas Association President & Executive Director Louis D. D’Amico today issued the following statement regarding comments made by Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration on a potential stopgap budget initiative under consideration by the General Assembly:

“Governor Wolf went out of his way to refer to a natural gas severance tax six times in today’s statement criticizing the potential development of a stopgap spending bill by the General Assembly. His mischaracterization of our industry’s tax burden and connection of a severance tax to education funding continues the long string of blatant lies that have characterized his campaign and his time in office.

 “He continues to play a shell game on the allocation of any funding for education from a severance tax, ignoring the fact that it would provide more than $300 million off the top – $225 million for current impact tax distributions and $55 million for a $675 million one-time bond to subsidize renewable energy – before the leftovers are distributed to schools and any money is available for property tax reductions, and he extends the baseless claim that the commonwealth is ‘letting oil and gas companies off the hook at the expense of our children and our schools,’ when there is no basis in fact for such a claim.

 “There continues to be nothing factually correct about the oil and gas industry’s ‘not paying its fair share’ of taxes. Pennsylvania’s natural gas industry pays the same taxes as every other business, along with an impact tax paid by no other industry. If we aren’t paying our fair share of taxes, neither is any other business in the Commonwealth. The answer is not another special tax on an industry that is slumping from low prices, excessive regulation and competition from dozens of other energy-producing states.

 “No one outside the administration and a cheerleading Southeast Pennsylvania media are buying the governor’s claim that the General Assembly is at fault for this budget stalemate. The governor does not understand that there is no support for his record tax package or his ‘diapers to caskets’ sales tax expansion plan. He needs to come to the table with a realistic spending package, and a tax on an industry that has lost tens of thousands of jobs in the past six months along with billions in reduced capital spending should not be part of the discussion.”

Read the Wolf administration statement: “Republicans protecting the status quo”

Watch a video of the governor’s September 16 news conference