YOUNGSTOWN - City Council will vote Wednesday on whether injection wells should be banned in the city.
Councilwoman Janet Tarpley, D-6th Ward and sponsor of the measure, said she wants injection wells banned because they have been linked to a series of a dozen earthquakes in the city between March and December of last year.
An injection well uses millions of gallons of wastewater from the drilling technique hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. The practice has been ridiculed and protested by environmental groups and defended by well operators as safe and responsible.
Tarpley said she is not opposed to other forms of drilling. She said one of the factors in her decision is the close proximity of a facility in Warren, Patriot Water, which treats water used in the fracking process and makes it cleaner to be used in other types of drilling.
Gov. John Kasich imposed a moratorium on injection wells within a 7-mile radius of a deep-injection site in the city after the series of quakes that culminated in a 4.0 magnitude tremor that later was linked to activity there.
She said her ordinance will not affect the only injection well in the city, operated by D&L Energy, but it will ban any further ones from operating there.
She said she was thinking of introducing the ordinance when council debated Mayor Charles Sammarone's proposal to lease the mineral rights on city owned land and use the money for demolition.
Now that Sammarone's proposal has been approved, Tarpley said she thought this was a good time to bring her proposal to council for a vote.
''We have to do something with these injection wells,'' Tarpley said.