Ohio Oil and Gas Land Management Commission must remove misleading letters from its website • Ohio Capital Journal
By Cathy Cowan Becker, Jess Grim, Mary Huck, Jenny Morgan, Anne Sparks and Melinda Zemper
Last September, Cleveland.com reporter Jake Zuckerman broke the story that dozens of Ohio residents whose names were listed under public comments supporting fracking in Ohio’s state parks and public lands had never submitted those comments.
Within days, the number of people who said they had not submitted pro-fracking letters with their names on them rose to nearly 150, and Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost vowed to investigate the case.
Save Ohio Parks volunteers were instrumental in identifying more than 100 people whose names appeared in public comments they did not submit to the Oil and Gas Land Management Commission, the body that decides whether to allow or ban fracking in Ohio’s state parks, wildlife refuges and other public lands.
Suspicious comments
Save Ohio Parks first noticed the anomalies last summer in 1,100 pro-fracking comments shortly after they were posted on the commission’s website. The comments were written in technical jargon, not in the language of a normal person. They all had the same subject line: “Secure Ohio’s energy future” and were identical except for the names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses at the end.
But the kicker was that the 1,100 comments were submitted in five batches, with each batch of hundreds of letters time-stamped at exactly the same minute. No matter what topic public comment is being made on, it is highly unlikely that hundreds of people will make identical comments in the same minute.
We learned that these letters were submitted by the Consumer Energy Alliance (CEA), a public relations firm for the oil and gas industry based in Houston. The CEA had collected Ohioans’ personal information for another purpose and then attached that information to public comments purporting to be in favor of fracking in our state parks, which they then forwarded to the state commission.
The CEA has previously used citizens’ personal data without their consent in public statements in favor of fossil fuels in several states, most recently in Ohio in 2016.
Save Ohio Parks presented our findings to the Commission Chair and asked her to remove these misleading letters from the Commission’s website. She refused. Instead, she told us to contact the Attorney General.
800 phone calls
Before that, we looked into the case in more detail. A dozen volunteers from Save Ohio Parks called over 800 people whose names were on the letters. We reached 107 of them.
Of the people we reached, 101 told us they had not made the comment. Many did not know what fracking was, some did not speak English, some did not have computers, and some were children. (Two said they had made the comment and four said they could not remember.)
Save Ohio Parks submitted our materials to the Attorney General’s Office in September 2023, but never received a response from Yost or the Commission.
Last week, we learned from WSYX-TV reporter Darrel Rowland that Yost’s investigation had been closed months ago. The attorney general’s findings confirm what we told the commission last year: that the Consumer Energy Alliance collected personal information from 1,100 Ohioans for a specific purpose and then used that information without their knowledge in public comments purporting to support fracking in our state parks and on public lands.
Yost is now proposing a new administrative rule that would label the Consumer Energy Alliance’s actions as a “deceptive act.” However, neither the investigation nor the proposed rule imposes penalties on the CEA or others who engage in such deception. Yost’s only response to the CEA’s misuse of Ohio citizens’ personal information was to send a strongly worded letter.
Commission must act
Save Ohio Parks again calls on the Commission to remove these 1,100 comments. It is wrong to publicly post the personal information of Ohioans that they did not submit themselves on a state website. Not only does this create the impression that there is more support for fracking in our state parks than is actually the case, it also puts these Ohioans at even greater risk of identity theft.
We also urge the Commission to stop rubber-stamping fracking in our Ohio state parks and conservation areas and instead listen to the thousands of Ohioans who have made actual public comments opposing oil and gas development on public lands. We the people pay for this land with our tax dollars and we have a say in what happens to it.
ORC 155.33(B)(1)(h) requires commissioners to consider “any comments or objections … presented to the Commission by residents of this State” when making their decision to approve or deny a property proposed for fracking. Yet not once has this Commission addressed the numerous public comments opposing fracking of public lands in Ohio, even as it continues to approve nominations and proposals to frack our parks and wildlife areas.
This must stop. We, the people of Ohio, own and use our public lands – only 3% of all the land in Ohio. We do not want to see this land irreversibly changed by toxic, industrial fracking.
Cathy Cowan Becker, Jess Grim, Mary Huck, Jenny Morgan, Anne Sparks and Melinda Zemper serve on the steering committee of Save Ohio Parks, a volunteer citizen group concerned about fracking in our state parks, preserves and public lands. For more information, visit saveohioparks.org.
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