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

A law quietly passed this summer aimed to end a complicated, decade-plus legal fight over who owns an estimated $1 billion in Pennsylvania natural gas.

It may have only begun a new, even messier chapter.

At issue are mineral rights — which give holders the right to extract coal, oil, gas, or ore — underneath as few as 60,000 acres to more than one million, depending on which side you ask.

For years, a group of families, led by the Proctor family trust , has waged a legal battle with the state over mineral rights that they say their ancestors acquired more than a century ago. The property in question was severed from the surface rights, which govern the ability to build a home, chop wood, or hunt on a piece of land. It now sits under a swathe of state game land.

The Proctors won a unanimous state Supreme Court case in May 2025 against the Pennsylvania Game Commission, which confirmed that the trust still holds the mineral rights to the land.

But a year later, the legislature undid the decision as it passed a flurry of budget-related bills in just 24 hours.

“I ask, what is the sudden rush?” wrote Sherman Powell, a Pennsylvania resident and member of the Proctor family, on behalf of the family trust in a June letter to senators opposing a draft of the bill. “This legislation does not solve a public emergency or improve government services. Instead, it is designed to transfer valuable private property rights from citizens to government and private entities.”

In a legal filing, the Shapiro administration said the 2025 ruling wouldn’t just apply to the Proctor family trust’s land. It estimated that up to 1 million acres of state park and forest land, along with their associated royalties, could be affected.

Those royalties are an important source of state funding. Almost half of the Game Commission’s annual funding in the 2024-25 fiscal year, about $100 million, came from natural resource development, including gas leases. The Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, which manages state forests and parks, brings in about the same each year from gas drilling alone.

A spokesperson for the trust said the administration’s estimate appears to be “based completely upon speculation.”

Still, the ruling’s potential impact led the state’s powerful natural gas lobby to support the new law, Act 27 .

In legal filings, drilling firm EQT and the industry’s trade group, the Marcellus Shale Coalition, argued 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.

A spokesperson for the coalition told Spotlight PA ahead of Act 27’s signing that the law will “provide certainty to current Pennsylvania property owners that acquired their property interests in accordance with the laws of the Commonwealth.”

Before the bill became law, state Sen. Gene Yaw (R., Lycoming), an ally of the powerful gas industry and chair of the upper chamber’s environmental committee, was direct about what he believes are the 2025 Supreme Court ruling’s implications.

“Every piece of property in that whole section of the state is exposed to that ruling in some fashion,” Yaw told Spotlight PA last month. “In Lycoming County, there are 52,000 parcels of land. Every one of those parcels, in some fashion, is subject to the Proctor issue.”

Yaw served as the county’s solicitor for years, and previously proposed legislation to “provide a surface owner of land with an advantage at the start of a court case where the ownership of mineral or oil and gas rights is unclear or unknown.” He has also argued that the separation of surface and mineral rights can be an “obstacle” to gas development.

In a July legal filing, the Game Commission rejected the claim that it had “acted as some nefarious puppeteer pulling the strings of the General Assembly and the Governor” to make the bill law.

A spokesperson for Gov. Josh Shapiro declined to comment on the law, citing ongoing litigation. Spokespeople for state House Democratic and Senate Republican leadership each did not respond to a request for comment.

To protect the mineral rights the Proctors won last year, their trust has spent big. Beyond the court fights, it has hired three Harrisburg government relations firms to lobby the General Assembly. And as lawmakers considered the bill, a mass text went out to an unknown number of individuals from a newly formed nonprofit asking recipients to tell Shapiro to veto the bill.

The effort didn’t work, and Shapiro signed the bipartisan bill into law on July 12, the day it reached his desk. Soon after, the Game Commission moved to drop a similar suit it filed in 2017 to quash the ownership issue on another 2,000 acres of land, saying the new law made its case moot. A court held a hearing on the move Monday and is weighing next steps.

Meanwhile, the Proctors’ attorneys have argued the law is unconstitutional and could expose the state to even more expensive litigation.

“The Proctors spent a lot of time doing the proper thing — going to court, litigating, and winning that these subsurface rights are theirs,” said Mark Aronchick, a veteran Philadelphia-based attorney who argued the case on the family’s behalf.

“There are very specific ways, for very specific reasons, that governments can acquire somebody else’s private property,” Aronchick added. “But this is not one of them.”

The case decided last year was filed by the Game Commission in 2012. The Supreme Court’s ruling governed only who owned what’s underneath some 400 acres of state game land in Bradford County.

The decision stems back to 1893, when Thomas Proctor and a business partner, involved in the prosperous leather industry that dominated north-central Pennsylvania, acquired some of the undeveloped land at issue. They then transferred the land to a subsidiary of a new leather-making corporation they founded. But critically, they only transferred the surface rights, while retaining the mineral rights.

The surface rights were then transferred to another corporate affiliate, the Central Pennsylvania Lumber Company. That company did not pay property taxes on the land, so the county sold it at a 1908 tax sale. At the sale, the land was bought by an agent of the lumber company. The agent sold the land back to the lumber company in 1910, which held onto it for another 10 years before selling the tract to the Game Commission.

When the land is undeveloped — known legally as “unseated” — a tax sale usually means that the mineral rights would be transferred alongside the surface rights. This is known as title washing .

The system was originally designed to discourage the nonpayment of taxes by absentee landowners while encouraging the development of wild land. But the process was also “ripe for abuse,” observed one law firm, and allowed large landholders like Central Pennsylvania Lumber Company “to avoid paying taxes indefinitely” through such straw purchases.

Enter the Proctors, who argue they still hold the mineral rights because of an 1890s state Supreme Court precedent that established that a title wash does not occur if the purchaser is the same entity or person who was delinquent on taxes. The logic is that someone shouldn’t be able to financially gain by violating tax law.

For many years, this dispute was just a theoretical legal debate. But when the shale boom of the 2000s made the mineral rights to these acres valuable, the disagreement took on new meaning. Drilling on the 400 acres disputed in the 2025 case alone brought in $2.1 million between approximately 2009 or 2010 and May 2025, a spokesperson for the Game Commission said. That money has been held in escrow due to the legal dispute over the land.

In this environment, the Game Commission sued the Proctors to establish that it, not the family, owned the mineral rights. Wading through conflicting precedents, the court sided with the Proctors.

Phillip Hook, a Greene County-based plaintiff’s attorney who has handled mineral rights cases, couldn’t estimate the amount of land that could be impacted by the Proctor ruling. In his own work in southwestern Pennsylvania, he’s encountered a handful of cases with similar circumstances where the title could be in question.

In the northern tier, where the legal battle was waged, there’s even more title uncertainty, he said. That’s due to a history of timber development and land speculation.

To Hook, the Proctor ruling primarily impacts “very large land owners, coal companies, oil and gas companies, people who have bought out huge amounts of tracts, who are going to have some portion of their portfolio affected by this.”

And even if only a few acres are up for dispute, Hook said, the disputed minerals’ price tag could rise fast due to the value of the resources that can be packed into even a single acre, let alone a hundred.

“It’s a pretty big undertaking to have to go out and figure out who owns these minerals again now, and it’s going to be a really big burden and risk on the producers,” Hook said. “They have the money and the people to do it, though. We’re talking a few million dollars in titlework, but part of billion-dollar budgets.”

There are three active cases pitting the Proctors against state agencies.

In legal filings last month, the family’s attorneys and the Game Commission exchanged barbs over the department’s attempt to end one such case. In a July 20 filing, the Proctors’ attorneys argued 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 trial.”

To that, the Game Commission retorted in its own July 28 filing that “put bluntly, legislation happens.”

Taking in the arguments in a hearing last week, Commonwealth Court Judge Stacy Wallace seemed to acknowledge some concerns with the legislative process that led to the law.

“The other two branches of government worked together in a rapid fashion that really doesn’t pass the smell test,” Wallace said after hearing the Proctors’ case. “And so I want you to know that the third branch isn’t hopping on the stinky trail.”

She will now decide whether to continue the case, or require the Proctors to file yet another suit if they desire to challenge the law.

This story was originally published by Spotlight PA and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.