WELLSBORO - The County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania elected Tioga County commissioner Mark Hamilton second vice president for the 2009 term.

Hamilton, in his second term as county commissioner, has a strong agricultural background. The Republican has served as District 7 representative to the association the past two years.

Hamilton said he looks forward to lobbying for the residents of rural Tioga County during his term, which will take him out of the county at least twice a month on day trips and four to five times a year on overnight trips to Harrisburg.

"I think this is a win-win for the county," he said. "If I'm in Harrisburg, I can better represent the views of rural Pennsylvania and lobby for things that will help our area."

Hamilton said he already is working on obtaining a piece of the natural gas/oil leasing bonanza about to arrive in Tioga County state forest lands for the county's constituents.

"CCAP has already positioned for gas lease money to come back to our area," he said, adding the figure could be in the millions of dollars, depending on how high the bidding goes between oil and gas companies interested in tapping in the Marcellus Shale formation which runs under most of the state and into West Virginia.

"This is the first leasing they are doing," he said of the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, which oversees more than 100,000 acres of state forest land in Tioga, Bradford and Lycoming counties.

The lease process gives the department the discretion on how the money will be spent, and Hamilton said he thinks some of it should come back to Tioga County.

"It would be an awful shame if all that money got funneled to the southeastern part of the state," he said.

Part of Hamilton's concern, and the concern of all three commissioners, he said, is what happens when the wells are tapped out and the gas companies disappear, leaving the counties to clean up.

"We are hoping to get some type of severance payment to clean up the well head by providing infrastructure 20 to 30 years from now," he said.

Founded in 1886, CCAP is a statewide, non-profit non-partisan association representing the commissioners, chief clerks, administrators, their equivalents in home rule counties and solicitors of the Commonwealth's 67 counties.

It promotes the common interests of the counties by encouraging communications among county elected officials and a better understanding of county government by federal, state and local elected officials as well as by private citizens, according to its Web site www.pacounties.org.