I live in NY in the Marcellus shale area and attended a meeting last week put on by the NY DEC. That's Department of Environmental Conservation, keep that in mind. I went in a bit naive it turns out as I had assumed they would give a reasonably balanced view. This is a rural area of small farmers and very low suburban population. It began with long boring introductions and the next hour plus consisted of five officials propounding on how wonderful the whole thing is. Not a single negative that I recall. They even used gas company lingo with words like "play" and such. Additionally that hour was also quite boring with repetitious info and a really crappy powerpoint type presentation. At one point excitement was created when someone got up between speakers and for about a minute spoke on things the officials weren't telling us. Some booing and a bit of clapping. At which point someone asked a state policeman to come down and stand behind the speakers with his arms crossed. Yikes a small show of force. The speaker following, the last one to speak, was particularly full of oil company speak. He trailed off into almost mumbling blather toward the end.

Next came a break and people could write their questions on cards and they would select them for the next hour. They read them and almost all were answered by one speaker. As in the first hour plus no questions from the audience were allowed. And during the answers this did not allow any real follow up on their answers. I saw utter boredom settling in and at least 60% of the people left during this time. It came to me that this was the plan. It was likely arranged this way to allow as little "disturbance" as possible. They did not finish with the card questions and finally it was time for the people to directly ask questions. There were some good ones but this was a weekday night and I could tell most were just ready to go home.

Some things I think I got after this meeting:
The officials had no idea what the chemicals are that are added to the water. Only some "soft" guesses. Maybe they would test the toxic frac water that would be treated in Pennsylvania ????
A total of 19 employees in the entire department (I assume the 5 speakers were of that 19) to oversee all leasing, inspecting, etc of the entire state of NY.
If 60% of the property owners in a "unit" choose to have this drilling occur, the rest have no choice. It will come under their land too. A unit was 640 acres, and is concocted by the gas companies. This is being changed to 40 - 640 acre units.
I thought we the tax payers paid the salaries of the DEC, whoops I guess we do but someone else gives a better bonus.

To trust our DEC is basically to trust the gas companies. And somehow trusting them to Environmental Conservation goes way beyond naive.