Oppose HB 1100 
May 27, 2020

On March 27th, Gov. Tom Wolf vetoed House Bill 1100, a dangerous bill that offers billions of dollars in taxpayer money to the gas and petrochemical industries to build more chemical and plastics factories in Pennsylvania.  Please uphold Governor Wolf’s veto. 

Here are some important facts:

  • When an industry wants to situate in a place, it is only required under Pennsylvania law (Act 14) to notify the “host” municipality and the county.  The county simply files the notice—it is not required to post it to the public. So, nobody else knows – unless they read the PA Bulletin every Friday for the entire state. 

  • Under the Pennsylvania Municipalities Planning Code, a host municipality, no matter how small, can make conditional-use changes to accommodate a large facility without consulting with contiguous or other affected municipalities. The accommodation by one municipality of a facility can affect nearby municipalities with damage to the view (e.g., waiving height restrictions, light pollution), as well as added noise, dust, and heavy truck traffic. 

  • Under the Pennsylvania Municipalities Planning Code, a municipality can somewhat determine where development occurs, but it cannot ban an activity that is legal in Pennsylvania. 

  • Next, DEP will award the two necessary permits for a facility (air quality and site disturbance) to any applicant that can engineer a project to specifications. 

  • DEP does not look beyond the fenceline at air quality. There could be a school or apartment complex nearby.

  • DEP’s approach to permitting does NOT consider the additional truck traffic caused by an industrial facility. (One exception: the permitting of municipal waste facilities.)

  • DEP’s permitting does not consider whether the hazardous material, thus manufactured, can be safely moved through Pennsylvania communities.  Communities are imperiled and local emergency responders are left on their own. 

  • DEP does not consider need, a.k.a, harms vs. benefits. To consider need, an “environmental assessment” would be required. DEP only does environmental assessments for municipal waste facilities. 

  • DEP does not consider ancillary development to frack ever wider areas to create the gas feedstock, build pipelines, and operate noisy compressors to deliver the gas to the facility. DEP does not consider the ancillary development to dispose of frack waste water. Each of those activities is permitted by DEP completely separately from the facility that creates the need for this gas extraction. 

  • DEP does not consider regional character and the ruination of tourism and historical land uses. 

  • PennDOT has no authority to restrict truck traffic volumes. 

  • PHMSA, a federal agency that regulates interstate movement of hazardous materials by rail, will not allow any state requirements that are stricter than federal. 

  • The current federal administration (Department of Energy) is promoting LNG export to foreign counties.  This policy will turn Pennsylvania in to an extraction colony financed by out-of-area investors.

All of the above just happened in Wyalusing Township, where the municipality allowed and DEP permitted a facility to manufacture liquefied natural gas from Marcellus-region fracked gas. This facility expects to fill fifteen 40-foot tankers per hour (and that is 15 returning, for one every two minutes going through communities along Route 6 or 29 and 309) or 100 rail cars per day (moving down the Norfolk Southern line) with highly flammable LNG, in order to transport it all the way to a port in New Jersey for export to foreign markets.  Twelve PA Counties will be imperiled.  

We can’t have a repeat of this sequence of events.  This facility is under construction presently.  As noted above, there are structural issues to the Pennsylvania Municipalities Planning Code and the DEP permitting process.  We cannot open the floodgates to polluting industries without protecting the basic rights of communities. 

HB1100 will enable more such facilities, fundamentally changing the character of our region. I do not want my taxpayer dollars to subsidize pollution, environmental degradation, and the ruination of community ambiance.   

There are better options for northeast Pennsylvania to create family-sustaining jobs than only those presented by gas and related industries who want to lock our region into an economy of and for the fracked gas and related industry.  

For all of these reasons, I am asking you to uphold Governor Wolf’s veto of HB 1100. 

Thank you.