Editor,

This is an open letter to the Oxford Town Board.

Governor Cuomo and the DEC have created an enormous amount of unnecessary angst and uncertainty in small Southern Tier towns with the state’s vaguely worded announcements on how they plan on dealing with high-volume, horizontal, hydraulic fracturing in New York. The state says that the revised SGEIS will be delivered at summer’s end, but they haven’t made clear how they will proceed. Will towns receive a grace period to review the SGEIS? Will they follow up their present acknowledgement of home rule with iron-clad, unsupercedable state regulations? The fact is that we don’t know how this will go. The Oxford Town Board must do better than our state officials to show leadership and govern responsibly by putting in a moratorium on hydrofracking. Revokable at any time you are ready to lift it, a moratorium allows you to stay in control of the timeframe. There is no doubt that you will need time to review and absorb the SGEIS, a document that is purportedly 4,000+ pages long, and to take appropriate measures to protect and safeguard the town.