Pa. has quietly passed a law undermining a court decision on lucrative mineral rights

Spotlight PA reports on a law passed quickly this summer that "aimed to end a complicated, decade-plus legal fight over who owns an estimated $1 billion in Pennsylvania natural gas" rights. As the article states, in the process, this legislation upended a unanimous Supreme Court ruling that said the Proctor family trust holds subsurface rights to property their ancestors have held for over 100 years.

Yes, you read that right - the legislature passed a retroactive law that took away a family’s property rights, just over a year after the Supreme Court upheld those rights. They did it without hearings, without public comment, and with very little debate. They quietly wrapped it into the budget negotiations this July.

As you will read below, a judge had something to say about that.

Why did this happen? Well, we don't know, exactly, but as Stephen Caruso reports in his Spotlight PA story, "Those royalties are an important source of state funding. Almost half of the Game Commission's annual funding in the 2024-25 fiscal year...came from natural resource development, including gas leases. The Department of Conversation and Natural Resources...brings in about the same each year from gas drilling alone."

And another Spotlight PA writer, Marley Parish, filed a story this summer noting that proposed bipartisan legislation in the PA House would give counties, municipalities and school districts 20% of revenue from timber harvesting, gas drilling and other revenue-generating activities in state parks, forests and game lands.

The Supreme Court's ruling in favor of the Proctor trust was seen as a threat by the natural gas industry, whose powerful association, the Marcellus Shale Coalition, argued that “the ruling created an unacceptable lack of clarity about state property laws for owners, public or private, who have leased land for oil and gas production." They said this even though experts aren’t able to estimate the impact of the Proctor decision.

The measure that stripped the Proctor family of their subsurface rights, Act 27, was signed into law in mid-July by Gov. Josh Shapiro. But the family is fighting back, arguing the law is unconstitutional. Although of three active court cases with state agencies underway, the Proctors are the ones defending themselves in two of them.

Shortly after Act 27 of 2026 was enacted, the Proctors' attorneys argued in a filing that "the Pennsylvania Constitution does not permit the General Assembly to legislate away a party's day in court, to take one litigant's property and hand it to another, or to enact sweeping retroactive changes to century-old property rules on a single weekend, behind closed doors, on the eve of the trial."

The Game Commission's response read, in part, "legislation happens."

At the Commonwealth Court hearing in early August, Judge Stacy Wallace said, "The two other branches of government worked together in a rapid fashion that doesn't pass the smell test...And so I want you to know that the third branch isn't hopping on the stinky trail."

We will continue to keep you updated on our efforts to regain the property rights taken from the Proctor family and others who also will have their property confiscated by virtue of Act 27.