Property Rights at Risk

Newly-signed Act 27 represents a direct attack on private property rights in PA. It allows the government to reach back generations and retroactively take away valuable mineral property rights that families have lawfully owned, inherited, and relied on for more than 100 years.   

In the very year that we celebrate our country’s 250th anniversary, we should be honoring the property rights principles that are at the heart of who we are as a nation and are among the most fundamental rights protected by our Constitution. Instead, lawmakers and the governor set a precedent that government can change the rules after the fact and strip citizens of property that courts, deeds, and history have long recognized as theirs. These are not disputed claims. 

These are property rights that just last year the Pennsylvania Supreme Court unanimously (7-0) upheld in favor of the heirs of Thomas E. Proctor and other families. Every Justice agreed that longstanding Pennsylvania law does not allow a surface owner to benefit by failing to pay taxes, causing a tax sale, and then eliminating the severed mineral rights by a tax sale purchase.