The iconic photo of a small home surrounded by a highrise is a testament to individual property rights in this country.

Alas, if the recommendations of Gov. Tom Corbett's Marcellus Shale Advisory Commission are approved, property owners will no longer have the right to deny gas drillers access to their properties.

The commission, composed largely of gas industry officials, approved a practice known as pooling, which permits drillers to force landowners to lease the mineral rights to the gas drillers if their neighbors have leased their properties.

Pooling is one of 96 recommendations presented by the commission on Friday.

Others include assessing an impact fee on drillers to ameliorate drilling's impact on local communities; expanding drillers' liability for contaminating well water; increasing setbacks from 100 to 300 feet from a stream or body of water; increasing fines for environmental violations; and imposing higher bonds on drillers.

A number of the recommendations also call for state departments and agencies, that have endured personnel cuts, such as PennDOT, the Public Utility Commission and the departments of Environmental Protection and Conservation and Natural Resources, to establish the means to monitor operations and assess damages and to create new systems to invoice drillers.

But the panel did not address air quality issues, and environmentalists claim the bond framework would not cover the cost of plugging wells. And while the commission proposed a local impact fee, specific fees were not addressed and the language suggests that the state will have to determine how much of the impact was due to drillers and how much was "normal" deterioration.

Although the commission's proposed impact fee for local communities garnered the most attention, the pooling recommendation is likely to become the prime issue as the recommendations move through the Legislature.

Corbett and state Senate President Pro Joe Scarnati oppose it.

Although 43 of the 96 recommendations have an environmental focus, the failure to establish an extraction tax — which Corbett said was off the table when he established the commission — remains the elephant in the room.

An industry-sponsored report that was released two days before the commission issued its proposal, asserted that the Marcellus shale deposit could produce 17.5 billion cubic feet of gas per day by 2020, which would make it "the single largest producing gas field in the United States."

Lt. Gov. Jim Cawley, who chaired the commission, said the recommendations represent "an important first step toward creating tens of thousands of jobs and leading the nation toward energy independence and doing so in an environmentally responsible way."

It's a cautious first step at best.

Yes, some environmental issues were addressed. But the impact fee does not address problems that could affect drinking water in communities downstream. Nor does it allow funds be used in statewide programs to remedy the environmental impact caused by drilling.

For an industry that uses hydrofracking to crack rock thousands of feet below the surface, this panel barely breaks new ground.