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This Thursday, February 11th, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation will be having a meeting on the futures of the Hammond Hill and Yellow Barn State Forests in the Forum room at Tompkins-Cortland Community College. The room will open at 6:30pm and DEC staff will give a brief presentation about the unit management planning process at 7:00pm.

The easiest place to see the full press release is here, including an extra conversation between Mike Ludgate and the DEC about how gas drilling might be involved. A few key pieces I've already learned from the release and conversation:

• These two state forests total more than 5,000 acres.

• The area between the two forests is Valley Head Moraine, which splits the St.Lawrence watershed (via Cayuga Lake) from the Susquehanna watershed.

• "At this point in time, Hammond Hill and Yellow Barn State Forests have not been nominated for oil and gas exploration or drilling, which is the first step in the lease process."

• For these forests, "New York State shares the mineral rights with the federal government."

There's also a link to another recently completed plan to get a sense of what they look like.

The tastiest event of the year, the Etna Chocolate Festival, will be this morning from 10:00am to noon at Houtz Hall, on Lower Creek Road in Etna.

Tonight from 7:00pm to 11:00pm, there will be a Valentine's Day dance for adults benefiting the Dryden Senior All Night Extravaganza June 25th.

I'm not sure why the state didn't notice a stream at the location of a gas well for which it issued a permit, but Dryden seems to have presented a case in how local officials can find genuine issues the DEC doesn't. This had come up at the January Town Board meeting, and I'm glad to see they got a positive response from the drilling company - who I suspect is aware that their popularity in the area is limited.

The future of the well isn't clear either, despite the permit having been issued by the state:

"There's a question of whether that well will even be drilled," said Jim Oursland, Anschutz's vice president of engineering. "The Cook well is one that we proposed, but we don't have any immediate plans within the next six months of actually drilling that well."

I'm very glad that the Town pursued this, especially given the state's attempts to minimize local control over everything related to gas drilling. State pre-emption of local regulation has really bothered since I first heard about gas drilling, and this seems like a step forward on that. We'll see what happens with the actual well, which isn't a Marcellus Shale well, so moved ahead under older rules.

In very different news, the SPCA is struggling after a seizure of 100 animals and hopes residents will come in and adopt them soon. Temple Grandin, an autistic professor and advocate for humane livestock handling, will be speaking at TC3 on February 23rd.

I've been holding off on writing about this, because it seems to come drip by drip. There are more of them appearing lately, though - Liz Benjamin, NGD, and now Capitol Confidential. The New York Times seems to be the journalistic epicenter of the story - we'll see what happens, I guess.

Destiny may not always be what it seems. If this turns out to be real, I fear for New York State going forward.

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