Welcome support for Pa. gas tax .....THUMBS UP:If you think about it a little, it's not all that surprising that state Sen. Richard Alloway, R-Chambersburg, would support a tax on natural gas drillers in Pennsylvania.
A Franklin County native, he gets his appreciation for the outdoors honestly; it's what led in part to his chairmanship of the Senate's Game and Fisheries Committee.
Quality hunting and fishing directly depends on quality game lands, and a tax on environmentally destructive natural gas drilling will generate the money desperately needed to ensure regulatory compliance.
On the other hand, it is a little unusual that a freshman senator would buck his party on such a high-profile issue. The GOP-controlled Senate, as a whole, was directly responsible for killing the gas tax by dragging its heels long enough to watch the door hit Gov. Ed Rendell on his way out.
The nut of the matter, as usual, lies somewhere in the middle. Alloway can express his appreciation for the woods precisely because a gas tax is no longer on the table, from any practical perspective.
His announcement of his support for a gas tax, first published on this page on Sunday, claimed he has been "advocating for some time" for a natural gas tax. Maybe so, but he certainly wasn't making many loud, public statements to that effect while the debate was at its most fierce six months to a year ago.
In the end, it doesn't really matter whether Alloway's gas tax support represents a principled risk, or a position made safe by its irrelevance in the face of overwhelming party opposition.
He's still lending weight to an issue that deserves more consideration than it will get from the Senate as a whole, or a gubernatorial cabinet overflowing with industry plants.
It will be interesting to see how Alloway will react to the Corbett cabinet likely to emerge from a transition team already drawing widespread criticism for its industry-heavy representation.
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