The radical group Citizens for a Healthy Jessup is floating a plan to try and prevent any new Marcellus gas-fired electric plants from getting built in the Keystone State. Aided and abetted by a corrupt local newspaper, the group tries to pass itself off as a collection of local concerned citizens. It’s nothing of the sort.
Jessup is the location of (currently) the largest natgas-fired electric plant in PA. Invenergy’s 1,480 megawatt, $1 billion Marcellus gas-fired electric plant, called the Lackawanna Energy Center (located near Scranton, PA) went online earlier this year (see PA’s Largest NatGas-Fired Electric Plant Officially Online).
Antis in Jessup opposed to the project got themselves elected to (seized power of) the local town board last year and since then have used use their position of power to hassle and oppose the project any which way they can (see Jessup Town Board Grills Invenergy re Tiny Emissions Releases).
A couple of local leftist Democrat politicians are now colluding with Citizens for a Healthy Jessup and the far-left, very radical Sierra Club, to float a new bill (or series of bills) that will make siting a new gas-fired electric plant nearly impossible to do, by stacking the deck against such projects via something called “host agreements.”
The following biased and one-sided article explains well enough so you get the idea:
Before a Chicago developer built a 1,485-megawatt natural gas-fired power plant in their backyards, the grassroots group Citizens for a Healthy Jessup never opposed such a large-scale project.
They certainly never studied host community agreements, which compensate municipalities like Jessup for housing things like power plants. And, they never imagined they would pioneer a public push to achieve a more lucrative host agreement between Jessup and Invenergy LLC. Invenergy built and now operates the combined-cycle Lackawanna Energy Center in Jessup after inking a $1 million annual host agreement with the borough in March 2016.
Now, the group that hired consultants, doggedly scoured the web researching host agreements and regularly reported its findings at public meetings, is leading the charge to implement in Pennsylvania the minimum host agreement standards it didn’t have the benefit of more than three years ago.
State Rep. Kyle Mullins, D-112, Blakely, and state Sen. John Blake, D-22, Archbald, are also behind the effort. The lawmakers are working with the citizens group and the Sierra Club on legislation establishing such standards for other communities targeted for power plant development.
“The bottom line is having the minimum standards at least gives you minimum protections,” Citizens for a Healthy Jessup member and Jessup council President Gerald Crinella said. “You are going to walk away from the table with something for your community.”
Legislative action
Companion bills soon to be introduced by Blake and Mullins in the state Senate and House, respectively, would impose a yet-undetermined host agreement fee structure based on the megawatt output of a proposed fossil fuel power plant with an electricity generating capacity of at least 10 megawatts.
The bills, which are being drafted, also would ensure host municipalities, school districts and counties each have a seat at the negotiating table when crafting host agreements.
All three taxing bodies would have to provide residents an opportunity to weigh in on a potential host agreement. The legislation also would provide guidance on how municipal, school and county officials may use host agreement revenues.
The bills may require the state Department of Environmental Protection to verify that a host agreement is in place and is compliant with the law before final permitting, Blake said.
It would require developers to provide an upfront payment for municipalities to hire experts, conduct studies or engage outside counsel. It also may require developers to increase payments annually or on some time scale based on certain metrics, but the lawmakers said that element is still being worked out.
“At the end of the day, we are trying to be prescriptive about the base minimum standards of these agreements,” Blake said. “Now that doesn’t mean that negotiations aren’t going to be more fruitful or that some accommodations are going to be made maybe greater than what we would provide as the minimum, but we just wanted to set a minimum set of what I would call uniform standards.”
Drafts of the bills are not yet available. Co-sponsor memos, where legislators agree to co-sponsor a bill, have yet to be circulated.
Invenergy spokeswoman Beth Conley said the company cannot comment on legislation it hasn’t seen.
Mullins said the legislation would not affect past deals like Jessup’s, but would better prepare other municipalities for future host agreement negotiations.
Some Citizens for a Healthy Jessup members said they believe Jessup’s host agreement with Invenergy would have been more valuable, especially for Valley View School District, if legislation like this existed to set baseline standards. The group fought hard for the borough’s 4,500-plus residents to get a fair sum to offset noise, traffic, pollution and other “negative impacts” of the plant, Crinella said.
“There’s so many deficiencies in the process that we discovered by our experience that became the outline of this legislation,” group President Jason Petrochko said. “And, if all of those things were in place, those deficiencies would be corrected and communities would be protected and taxpayers would be protected.”
Jessup’s deal
Jessup’s final, $1 million annual host agreement with Invenergy was significantly more lucrative than Invenergy’s original $500,000 annual offer but still disappointed Citizens for a Healthy Jessup, which now has more than 60 members. The group implored borough council to hire additional experts and insisted the borough was leaving money on the table, citing examples of power plant host agreements in other states.
More than a year after the agreement was approved, a local political revolution swept a slate of several early Invenergy critics onto borough council.
The agreement guarantees Jessup $1 million for each year the plant operates, with a 10 percent increase each decade, among other terms. The borough also received $500,000 during the plant’s construction and will collect an annual initial operating period fee of $400,000 for five years. Of that $2 million total, Valley View School District gets $500,000 over a five-year period.
The relatively small amount for Valley View, which faces a $1.3 million deficit, underscores the need for the legislation, Crinella and group member Jeff Smith said.
While every bit helps, Valley View Business Manager Corey Castellani said the $100,000 annual payment, which begins this year, doesn’t go far with rising healthcare, special education and other costs and mandatory pension contributions.
The district would have loved to help negotiate the Invenergy host agreement but was not given the opportunity, Castellani said.
“The hard thing for us to deal with back then was that we just didn’t have a spot at that table,” he said. “If we were there, we could have fought for more money for the school district.”
Invenergy officials and former Jessup solicitor Richard Fanucci, who negotiated the final host agreement with the company, defended the deal.
“The borough of Jessup voted on and approved the Lackawanna Energy Center Host Community Agreement, the largest power plant host community agreement by total dollars in Pennsylvania, and the benefits speak for themselves,” Invenergy said in a written statement. “Many power plants in Pennsylvania, including some that have come online recently, have been developed with no host community agreement at all.”
Fanucci, Valley View’s solicitor for nearly three decades, noted Invenergy was not legally bound to offer Jessup any host agreement. Without state-imposed minimum standards, Fanucci said negotiating and approving the host agreement “was 100 percent a municipal decision” that council made at the time.
In its statement, Invenergy argued the agreement will generate more than $50 million for the borough over the life of the project and that the power plant will generate more than $15 million in new tax revenue for Valley View once the facility loses its tax-exempt status in 2023. The company invested more than $285 million in the local economy since construction began, including $170 million in wages and benefits for workers, and donated nearly $500,000 to local nonprofits, according to the statement.
Jessup officials made their host agreement a condition of Invenergy’s conditional use permit, meaning they could pull the permit if the company didn’t comply.
Citizens for a Healthy Jessup and Fanucci touted having legislation as a tool to protect communities that may not take that step.
“To me, this legislation is a long time coming and overdue,” said Fanucci. “It’s only fair that they have a law, and only fair and right to school districts and counties and everybody who has an interest in the community, just like there’s laws for landfills (and) casinos.”
Members of the group continue to argue Fanucci failed in his duty to secure the best deal for the borough and the district, a charge he emphatically rejects.
Political prospects
The legislators and Citizens for a Healthy Jessup say there could be bipartisan support for the bills because fossil fuel power plants are planned or proposed in both Democratic and Republican areas of the state.
“When we circulate the co-sponsor memo regarding these minimum standards that we want to establish for Pennsylvania, we’re going to direct them to the lawmakers where the plants are being planned so we can get some bipartisan support for it,” Blake said.
Petrochko endorsed the strategy.
“It’s hard to be a representative in a district where a power plant is coming and not be in favor of something that is going to benefit your communities and your school districts and your counties,” he said.
At the same time, Smith said residents in those communities should embrace the same kind of focused community engagement Citizens for a Healthy Jessup has practiced these past years.
“This is a statewide bill, but it does not take the focus off local elections and in your planning meetings and in your council meetings,” he said. “That’s where you are effective. That’s where your life revolves around … and to be involved there is to be part of a community.”*
What’s maddening is antis’ refusal to be honest about their intentions. This is NOT about preventing poor, unsuspecting communities from being snookered by big, evil corporations who want to screw them over. This Trojan horse legislation is about slowing, blocking and stopping any more natural gas-fired electric plants from ever getting built in the Keystone State. Period. This group’s alignment and cooperation with the radical Sierra Club is the tip-off. The tell. The sign.
Jessup Borough had a population of 4,676 at the last census taken in 2010. If 60 of those residents belong to this fringe, radical group called Citizens for a Healthy Jessup, that’s 1% of Jessup’s population. Is Jessup (indeed the entire state) going to let 1% of the residents from a tiny borough dictate that the rest of the state can’t build any more clean-burning natural gas-fired electric plants that burn PA’s own locally extracted gas? Will PA residents let arrogant one-percenters tell them how they will live their lives? We certainly hope not!
*Scranton (PA) Times-Tribune (Mar 31, 2019) – Jessup activists push legislation on power plant host agreements
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