Greg Boso is a Senator representing WV State Senate District 11, which covers the counties of Upshur, Randolph, Pendleton, Nicholas, Webster, and Pocahontas, as well as a portion of Grant County. In his last election, he took over five thousand dollars from oil and gas companies, and in 2017 he voted for SB 576.
SB 576
West Virginia SB 576, introduced toward the end of the 2017 session, was the latest in a series of Forced Pooling bills aimed at allowing large gas companies to take mineral rights from private owners without their consent. A slightly watered-down version of earlier SB 244, it contained two especially threatening provisions to West Virginia’s citizens.
One was called “lease integration” by the authors, but dubbed “invisible ink” by many of the citizens’ rights groups fighting it. This provision would have allowed gas companies to forcibly pool old leases that were written before the age of pooling into a single drilling unit at the lowest possible rate allowed by law, well below what modern contracts often offer, all without the owners’ consent.
The second provision was the latest rebranding of Forced Pooling, now labeled under the name “Co-Tenancy”. This would have allowed minority owners of minerals, even the minerals under their own land, to be forced to allow extraction of those minerals if the other owners agreed. It would have allowed the government to directly force West Virginia citizens to sell their property to gas companies who wanted to develop it.
Tim Mullens
March 6, 2018 — 12:58 am
Because he refuses to tax our natural resources adequately, he refuses to vote to raise pay for teachers, school service personnel, state police, and state workers. Some of these natural resources aren’t taxed at all. He states that if we tax them they won’t drill. Yet, there is hundreds of miles of 3ft diameter pipe stacked at numberius sites throughout the state. We’ve been called the New Saudi Arabia for the amount of energy we are sitting on. Yet, if they have to pay more tax they’ll go drill in another state. The truth is evident that some one is getting paid the big bucks to misrepresent the hard working people of district 11. Oh, by the way when he was asked by our teachers from our district if he’s going to do the right thing for our district he stated that he represents the whole state. We’ll Greg it’s been 45 years since you’ve had a lesson in basic civics. That’s not how this works. We will remember when you come asking us for votes. Never Again.