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A court ruling last week -- ordering protesters to leave a Huntingdon County plot slated for a natural gas pipeline -- is just one volley in a running cross-state battle between developers and environmentalists.
A series of proposals in Harrisburg could one day tip the balance further against protesters, as a few lawmakers in Pennsylvania seek to ramp up criminal penalties for those who interfere at development sites.
Legislators in several states have sought new laws restricting protests, increasing punishments or, in a few cases, allowing non-protesters to hit protesters with their cars. In some states, they have explicitly cited anti-pipeline protests and clashes with police in arguing that laws should be toughened.
"There's work being done in Harrisburg, I will tell you, on this -- to hopefully try to prevent this," Sen. Scott Martin, R-Lancaster, said at a May law enforcement seminar, specifically referencing pipeline battles in North Dakota. Martin, whose home county has been the site of protests against pipeline construction, has said he will sponsor a bill to make some protesters pay for policing and cleanup.
So far, none of the proposals in Pennsylvania have gone far. One, Senate Bill 652, has awaited a vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee since April.
Formally titled the Critical Infrastructure Protection Act, the bill would ramp up punishments for anyone who enters, damages or refuses to leave a "critical infrastructure facility."
The bill identifies many facilities under that definition, among them natural gas distribution lines and compressor stations.
The bill would call for serious penalties: Anyone who enters such a facility without permission would face a second-degree felony charge and up to a year in prison. Anyone who damages one, camps there and refuses to leave or conspires with another person to do so -- a description that could cover local anti-pipeline protests -- would face a first-degree felony charge and up to two years in prison, as well as hefty fines.
Senate Bill 652 closely resembles a similar measure passed this spring in Oklahoma, which imposes serious charges and fines up to $1 million for those who interfere with so-called critical infrastructure.
Free speech activists have raised alarms on similar proposals, pointing to a nationwide trend in reaction to anti-pipeline and Black Lives Matter protests.
"It's an excessive expansion of criminalizing trespassing," Pennsylvania American Civil Liberties Union Legislative Director Elizabeth Randol said of the infrastructure bill. "These kind of things have an overall chilling effect on people's right to petition."
Randol said the bill, sponsored by Sen. Mike Regan, R-Cumberland, follows a trend of "hypercriminalization" in which existing offenses -- in this case misdemeanor or summary trespassing -- are escalated to serious felonies.
Another proposal, which hasn't yet appeared as a full bill, is Martin's plan to fine protesters and protest groups who incur additional costs to local or state governments. Martin has issued a memo soliciting co-sponsors on his proposal, which he said could extend to groups that support or aid protests.
"We're actually working on a civil liability bill -- that people who knowingly allow these things or sponsor them to happen and they're identifiable individuals, when you're utilizing our resources in a way that's well beyond exercising your free speech, that there could be a financial cost associated with that," Martin said at his May seminar.
Martin's memo pointed to the millions of dollars spent when police in North Dakota, backed by security contractors and heavily armed National Guard forces, fought protesters opposed to the Dakota Access Pipeline.
Police in Pennsylvania have geared up for similar battles as pipeline projects, including the Mariner East 2 line running through Cambria, Blair and Huntingdon counties, spur protests in rural areas. An ex-military contractor whose company advised officials in North Dakota, wrote an op-ed in May warning Pennsylvanians of "lawlessness and unbridled aggression" if similar protests continue here.
Martin used similar language when he discussed his possible bill, warning of "anarchists and other groups (that) send people in and are given instructions on how to overwhelm police."
That language, along with a growing atmosphere of confrontation in places like Huntingdon, has helped spur official interest in protest crackdowns. Randol of the ACLU said many bills can be traced to specific incidents, even when they cover broader issues than just pipeline protests.
"It's very easy to kind of connect them back to particular protests. A lot of this pipeline stuff has to do with Standing Rock," she said, referring to the American Indian reservation where the North Dakota protests began.
Efforts to pass what the ACLU calls anti-protest bills have had mixed success in other states. Some have been stopped, including efforts to exempt drivers from liability if they strike protesters blocking streets.
The Pennsylvania efforts remain far from passage. But they could be discussed again as protesters prepare for legal and physical confrontations along pipeline routes.
The focus on one or two specific proposals, Randol said, can conceal their broader effect as similar bills become more common across the country.
"We sometimes fail to see the broader pattern," she said. "I think we're seeing this in a lot of pieces of legislation that are responding to what's happening in the political climate."
Mirror Staff Writer Ryan Brown is at 946-7457.