Voters in Youngstown, Ohio on Tuesday rejected a measure that would have banned drilling for oil and gas within city limits, effectively allowing the region’s burgeoning hydraulic fracking industry to continue operating there.

Anti-fracking activists had come to the table with the charter amendment, which they termed the “Community Bill of Rights,” this past February after gathering enough signatures to get it on the ballot. At the time, nearly 3,800 residents had put their support behind the bill. However, only 2,880 turned out to vote in favor of it this week, while 3,821 voted to strike it down. (Youngstown has a population of about 66,500.)

Journalist Sarah Goodyear reported on the fracking industry in Youngstown for a March Forefront story. Public health incidents associated with the practice are numerous and dramatic. In early February, one company — which had already racked up at least 120 violations across the state — was caught illegally dumping its wastewater into the city’s sewer system.

Furthermore, the region experienced at least 10 earthquakes in 2011, after fracking had begun. Authorities traced their origins to injection wells, another (legal) way fracking companies dispose of their wastewater by pumping it deep underground. For an area that had never seen an earthquake before, this sudden seismic activity was cause for alarm.

The onset of two larger quakes within a single 24-hour that December really got the local anti-fracking movement going. As Goodyear found:

The earthquakes served to galvanize larger public awareness about the potential dangers of fracking, said [activist Howard] Markert, who has been active in Occupy Youngstown as well. “It really woke people up to what was going on,” he said.

At the time, moving the Community Bill of Rights forward had been a big step forward for Markert and others in their fight against hydrofracking,

Political support for fracking often hinges on the industry’s potential as a jobs creator. Youngstown Mayor Charles Sammarone, touting the economic opportunity for a city whose poverty rate leads the nation, has said that he welcomes fracking so long as it’s regulated to prevent future earthquakes and public health risks. Last fall, the Youngstown City Council voted 5-2 to open 180 acres of city-owned land to fracking.

A March 2013 report by Cleveland State University’s Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs found only modest employment growth in Ohio counties with shale reserves, where fracking happens, between 2009 and 2012. The job growth in these counties mirrored the state as a whole.