NORWICH – When a natural gas well’s spacing unit encompasses two towns - or even two counties - it’ll be up to real property tax directors to determine how the receipts get distributed to local governments, fire, school and other special districts.

The learning curve for property assessors is currently steep and will climb higher, say members of Chenango County’s Natural Gas Committee. The cooperation involved will be tedious at best.

“When the time comes, we will have to give up production values to each other,” said Supervisor James Bays, D-Smyrna.

“That can be hard to do,” Committee Chairman Peter C. Flanagan, D-Preston said.

Especially when those values aren’t being supplied by government meter readers, but by contractors hired by the natural gas companies themselves. Neither the state’s Real Property Tax Services nor the Department of Environmental Conservation have apparatuses in place to assure what well the gas is actually coming from before it hits the New York State Electric and Gas, Dominion or Millennium pipelines.

On the flip side, Norse Energy, Inc. attorney and spokesman Dennis Holbrook said the independent, third party meter readers who do the work “have no incentive” not to measure the production properly.

“We are on the same side of the equation as the landowner we’ve leased from. We would be shortened in the same manner the landowners would be. The only beneficiary (of false readings) would be the utility that is taking the product,” he said.