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Below the Surface

Matt Rourke / AP

IS THERE A PLOT UNDERWAY TO UNDO A STATE SUPREME COURT DECISION AND STRIP SOME PENNSYLVANIANS OF LUCRATIVE MINERAL RIGHTS? That’s what the family at the center of the case believes. 

The alleged plot starts with a unanimous opinion, issued by the high court last year, wrapping up a nearly 13-year legal battle between the Proctor Family Trust and the state Game Commission over who owns what lies underneath some 400 acres of state game land in Bradford County. 

That precedent matters for the Proctors, who, alongside other families, are involved in active state and federal litigation over tens of thousands of acres of additional land facing ownership questions complicated by the history of extraction and speculation within the state’s northern tier.

“The Proctors spent a lot of time doing the proper thing — going to court, litigating, and winning that these subsurface rights are theirs,” said Mark Aronchick, a veteran Philadelphia-based attorney who argued the case on the family's behalf. “And then a year later … along comes the state [which] wants to pass a statute, saying, in essence, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had it all wrong.”

“There are very specific ways, for very specific reasons, that governments can acquire somebody else's private property,” Aronchick added. “But this is not one of them.”

But the state believes the case has wide-ranging implications. That’s why the legislature may act quickly to overturn the ruling in the hectic weeks around the commonwealth’s June 30 budget deadline. 

A SPOKESPERSON FOR STATE SENATE LEADERSHIP DIDN’T COMMENT ON THE ALLEGED PLAN, while the governor’s office didn’t respond to inquiries. A senator who controls a key committee would only acknowledge that the Shapiro administration and legislature are discussing legislation to address the ruling.

However, that lawmaker, state Sen. Gene Yaw (R., Lycoming), was direct about what he believes are the ruling’s implications: “Every piece of property in that whole section of the state is exposed to that ruling in some fashion. … In Lycoming County, there are 52,000 parcels of land. Every one of those parcels, in some fashion, is subject to the Proctor issue.” Yaw is a lawyer who was a county solicitor for years.

The state’s powerful natural gas industry has also raised concerns with the ruling. For instance, drilling firm EQT and the industry’s trade group, the Marcellus Shale Coalition, say the ruling creates an unacceptable amount of uncertainty over the state’s property laws.

The Shapiro administration also believes the stakes are high. In a legal filing, it estimated that the mineral rights of up to 1 million acres of state park and forest land could be affected. Revenue from that drilling helps pay for the state’s conservation programs. 

However, the Proctors dispute that claim. Through a spokesperson, the family said the department’s numbers appear to be “based completely upon speculation.” 

THE CASE’S HISTORY CAN BE TRACED BACK TO 1893, when Thomas Proctor and a business partner, involved in the prosperous leather industry that dominated north-central Pennsylvania, acquired some of the undeveloped land at issue. They then transferred the land to a subsidiary of a new leather-making corporation they had founded. But critically, they only transferred the surface rights, while retaining the mineral rights.

The surface rights were then transferred to another corporate affiliate, the Central Pennsylvania Lumber Company. That company did not pay property taxes on the land, so the county sold it at a 1908 tax sale. At the sale, the land was bought by an agent of the lumber company. The agent sold the land back to the lumber company in 1910, which held onto it for another 10 years before selling the tract to the state Game Commission. 

When the land is undeveloped — legally known as “unseated” — a tax sale usually means that the mineral rights would be transferred alongside the surface rights. This is known as title washing.

However, all along, the Proctors argued they still held the mineral rights, citing a state Supreme Court precedent that a title wash is void if the purchaser is the same entity or person who was delinquent on taxes. The logic is that someone shouldn’t be able to gain something by violating tax law.

When the shale boom of the 2000s made the mineral rights in these rural acres valuable, the disagreement took on new meaning. For instance, drilling on the 400 acres disputed in this case alone brought in $2.1 million between approximately 2009 or 2010 and May 2025, a spokesperson for the Game Commission said. That money has been held in escrow due to the legal dispute over the land.

In this environment, the state Game Commission sued the Proctors to establish that it, not the family, owned the mineral rights. Wading through conflicting precedents, the court sided with the Proctors.

LAST FRIDAY, A REP FOR THE PROCTOR HEIRS SENT A LETTER TO SENATORS. In it, the person said they had been “made aware of an effort to rush through legislation that would strip private property rights from Pennsylvania families — including my own family — who have owned, inherited and relied upon those rights for more than a century.”

“I ask, what is the sudden rush?” Sherman S. Powell wrote on behalf of the family trust. “This legislation does not solve a public emergency or improve government services. Instead, it is designed to transfer valuable private property rights from citizens to government and private entities.”

As of this morning, no language had been introduced, nor had any action been taken. But should that change, Powell warned that “Pennsylvania taxpayers could face years of costly constitutional litigation and potentially billions of dollars in claims arising from the taking of property rights.”

The Feed

→ The growing consensus in the rotunda — based on my conversations with lawmakers, lobbyists, and staff — is that a budget deal will pass just before the Fourth of July holiday, or lawmakers will leave with a handshake deal in place and pass the package during the first full week of July. Details that would indicate if such a timeline is feasible are scarce.

→ One thing is clear: Balancing the budget will likely require using an unknown amount of the state’s almost $8 billion rainy day fund, as I reported with my colleague Jaxon White. We also ran down the expanding list of options for new revenue that have come up this June.

I’d also highlight that while drawing from the rainy day fund is supposed to require support from a two-thirds supermajority — a margin that would hand additional leverage to the minority party and rank-and-filers — the body set a precedent in 2020 that could avoid such an outcome. At the time, the then-GOP-controlled legislature passed a budget-enabling code bill that took money from the fund with a simple majority. It was signed by then-Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat. Eight out of ten of the General Assembly’s current top legislative leaders voted for it.

→ The state House passed a raft of bills to regulate or otherwise restrict data centers this week with wide bipartisan support. That includes a bill to let local governments place a 180-day moratorium on data center project applications, a bill to establish Shapiro’s GRID standards, and a bill to repeal the state’s sales tax exemption for data center components. GRID earned the fewest votes of the three.

“This is a rising tide of populism,” state House Majority Leader Matt Bradford (D., Montgomery) said of the votes on the floor Wednesday. He argued that there’s a place for responsible data center development, and that “Demagoguery never built anything. Demagoguery is not leadership.” Still, he allowed the votes to proceed. “The only option that is not available,” Bradford added, “is the one that the Senate has chosen: to do nothing.” 

The bills go to the state Senate, where GOP incumbents with tough reelections have pushed for stricter rules, including a moratorium, press room intern Ethan Young reported for PennLive. (Look for more from him later this week.)

Majority Leader Joe Pittman (R., Indiana) told Access Harrisburg earlier this month that the debate “has been very dynamic” and that he doesn’t want to lose out on economic opportunity from the industry but was mindful of energy and local control concerns. “If there are ideas around how to better handle the data center developments, we're certainly willing to talk about that.” He did not offer further specifics.

→ A GOP-controlled Senate committee advanced a key Democratic priority — placing additional guardrails on private equity firms' ability to acquire hospitals. The bill, championed by Delaware County’s legislators and Shapiro, would add extra layers of review from the attorney general’s office to prevent the sudden closure of recently acquired facilities, like Crozer.

Hospitals and nursing homes oppose the bill, raising concerns about the impact of cutting off access to a key source of capital. They blame regulations and low reimbursement rates for closures. Some of those issues were addressed in amendment language, which exempted acquisitions of nursing homes or intellectual property from review. But additional last-minute tweaks caught the panel's Democrats by surprise, leading to some no votes.

Institutional Sustainability & Innovation Committee Chair Frank Farry (R., Bucks) said feedback from hospitals, nursing homes, and other entities led to the compromise language: “While some wanted to disregard that stakeholder feedback, we actually engaged.”

In a statement, the state’s influential hospital association said it is neutral on the bill as currently written. “This legislation adds new oversight and restrictions on health care transactions,” said CEO Nicole Stallings, “but it does not take away the urgent need to address the reimbursement deficit driving hospital closures and service reductions across the commonwealth.” (Addressing the latter, of course, requires more state spending.)

→ Cycle 3 campaign finance reports are in, and Shapiro continues to outraise Republican Stacy Garrity. Shapiro took in $4.3 million between May 5 and June 8; Garrity just $685,000. Most interesting takeaways? Shapiro had three $250,000 checks from Conshohocken real estate mogul Mitch Morgan, Massachusetts construction contractor John Fish, and the Philly trial lawyers’ PAC. 

Garrity’s biggest check was $55,000 from a PAC funded by Western Pennsylvania business and labor interests, chaired by U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick’s former campaign manager. She also got $10,000 from Western Pennsylvania coal magnate D. Scott Kroh, who, alongside his family members, previously gave tens of thousands of dollars to Shapiro. But most interesting? A $33,500 in-kind contribution of a “flight” from Michael Pace, the founder of skill games developer Pace-O-Matic, dated May 11.

→ BTW, remember Protecting Our Democracy, the PAC that sent out mailers that used antisemetic dog whistles to attack Senate Democrats’ preferred candidate in a key swing district primary? It finally filed a campaign finance report. It received $52,000, almost entirely from a PAC for skill games operators, and spent about the same amount on its mailers. If it filed any independent expenditure reports to indicate where its spending went, they are not yet available online. Hence why I write about Pennsylvania’s loophole-ridden campaign finance system.

→ A longtime reader emailed me this week to ask about why it’s so dang hard to pass a deal. “I know it's a split legislature, all making way too much money and way too big…but come on.”

I replied, “Think about it like this. Have you ever watched a silly detective movie where a family is at each other's throats over the huge inheritance left by a patriarch? That's the position our lawmakers are in. In the movie, this usually leads to a murder. In Harrisburg, it leads to a budget impasse. Put another way, the personalities and motives matter.”

The Read

💬 My Spotlight PA colleague Hanna Holthaus acquired a trove of government emails and texts that show the communication breakdown between all levels of government over the proposed ICE detention center in Berks County.

🎤 Both Garrity and Shapiro are willing to hold a debate, an increasingly rare political event in which candidates answer questions from an impartial moderator to ascertain their positions on issues of great social and political import, reports my Spotlight PA colleague Jaxon White. Big, if true. (And shoutout to any oldheads like me who were at the 2018 Alex Trebek-moderated debate between Gov. Tom Wolf and Scott Wagner.)

🗳️ Among the commonwealth’s alphabet soup of obscure boards, commissions, and panels is the Election Law Advisory Board, created in 2020 to “review and recommend changes to Pennsylvania’s near-century-old election law,” reports Carter Walker of Votebeat. However, it hasn’t met in nearly three years, in part because Shapiro has failed to fill seven seats.

🎱 In an effort to raise revenue to help fill a budget hole, Pittsburgh City Council is considering a scalable levy on amusements running from $10 on pool tables up to $1,000 for gaming devices. The hope is that “if the state decides to tax the revenue from the skill games, they’ll allow any municipality that had already been collecting a tax off of them to continue doing so,” reports Hallie Lauer of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

💸 As the General Assembly considers stricter rules for manufactured homes, the state teacher’s pension fund has sold its stake in a high-end trailer park developer, reports Joe DiStefano of The Inquirer, making a tidy $700 million profit.

🏙️ Allegheny County voters will consider charter amendments this fall that would expand council members’ benefits and allow them to hire full-time staff, reports Jacob Geanous of the Post-Gazette.

🔵 Dan Moraff, the political operator who recruited Graham Platner, cut his teeth recruiting a wave of left-wing Pittsburgh primary challengers — including Summer Lee and a failed opponent to Allegheny County DA Stephen Zappala — that shook up the city's establishment politics, reports the Wall Street Journal.

🏦 Few journalistic endeavours get closer to a first draft of history than obituaries for the powerful individuals who’ve shaped our world. In that spirit, this obituary by the Washington Post’s Neil Irwin of former American central banker Alan Greenspan, who grew from a baseball stat savant and jazz musician into the most influential unelected official in the country, is worth your time.

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