On June 30, 2014, the New York Court of Appeals issued a decision upholding local bans on shale gas drilling. In response to challenges to local zoning ordinances that prohibited oil and gas drilling in Dryden and Middlefield, New York, the court held that “the statewide Oil, Gas, and Solution Mining Law does not preempt the home rule authority vested in municipalities to regulate land use.” The court supported its decision by highlighting that New York’s oil and gas law does not specifically list zoning as preempted and explaining that “the zoning ordinances at issue are directed at regulating land use generally and do not attempt to govern the details, procedures or operations of the oil and gas industries.”
