Our first victory of 2017! Hazardous waste incinerator defeated in the heart of gasland.

On March 29th, 2017, a rur­al town­ship in Susque­han­na Coun­ty, Penn­syl­va­nia, passed a local clean air law based on one we draft­ed for them in June 2016. It may be the first in the coun­try to con­tain a “cit­i­zen suit” pro­vi­sion, allow­ing any Town­ship res­i­dent or tax­pay­er to sue to enforce the ordi­nance if the gov­ern­ment isn’t doing its job.

On Jan­u­ary 10th, Tyler Cor­ners LP nixed their plans for a haz­ardous waste incin­er­a­tor in New Mil­ford Town­ship, Susque­han­na Coun­ty, Penn­syl­va­nia due in part to a “cold pub­lic reception.”

In 2014, we helped defeat a relat­ed haz­ardous waste incin­er­a­tor pro­pos­al by “Route 13 Bris­tol Part­ners LP” for Bris­tol Town­ship, Bucks Coun­ty, PA. Right after that, the same play­ers start­ed work­ing to relo­cate in Susque­han­na Coun­ty, the heav­i­ly fracked rur­al com­mu­ni­ty in north­east­ern Penn­syl­va­nia from where the Gasland film came. In this lat­est effort, they were joined by busi­ness­man Louis DeNaples, well known as a pow­er­ful orga­nized crime fig­ure in the region and own­er of a land­fill near Scranton.

The pro­pos­al only became known to the com­mu­ni­ty in mid-2016, after two years of behind-the-scenes devel­op­ment work. Local res­i­dents con­nect­ed with Ener­gy Jus­tice Net­work, and brought us in to speak in June 2016. We draft­ed and shared a Clean Air Ordi­nance that the town­ship could use to set more pro­tec­tive stan­dards than the state and fed­er­al min­i­mums. Such ordi­nances have always scared away any poten­tial polluters.

While the com­mu­ni­ty is very divid­ed over frack­ing and gas infra­struc­ture issues, peo­ple came togeth­er in force to oppose this incin­er­a­tor. We helped res­i­dents form the Susque­han­na Clean Air Net­work (SCAN). SCAN mem­bers did mas­sive out­reach, and turned peo­ple out for local meet­ings and kept the pres­sure on.

We met with Town­ship and Coun­ty offi­cials to move the Clean Air Ordi­nance for­ward. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the Town­ship solic­i­tor decid­ed to hire a law firm that usu­al­ly works for pol­luters, and an envi­ron­men­tal con­sult­ing out­fit that has always encour­aged local gov­ern­ments to be less pro­tec­tive than we ask them to be in our local ordi­nances. The Town­ship paid around $30,000 to their solic­i­tor and these out­fits to devel­op their own ordi­nance based on ours.

Despite mount­ing oppo­si­tion, Tyler Cor­ners filed pre-appli­ca­tion doc­u­ments with the state in late Octo­ber, then asked the state to put those plans on hold two weeks lat­er. On Jan­u­ary 10, they announced that they’re can­cel­ing the project — just two days before the Town­ship held a hear­ing and meet­ing on their pro­posed ordi­nance… and was poised to adopt it if not for exten­sive com­ments we wrote expos­ing how bad­ly the Town­ship’s lawyers and con­sul­tants screwed it up.

After see­ing our com­ments, the Town­ship’s attor­neys decid­ed not to adopt their ordi­nance in Jan­u­ary and spent two months address­ing com­ments and revis­ing the ordi­nance — most­ly to address issues we raised.

The ordi­nance should still be a deter­rent to any waste incin­er­a­tor try­ing to locate in the Town­ship. How­ev­er, the Town­ship weak­ened our pro­pos­al and intro­duced many loop­holes, such as allow­ing many waste-burn­ing indus­tries to escape the ordi­nance alto­geth­er if they burn so-called “bio­mass” or get their waste rede­fined as a “fuel.” While we do not rec­om­mend this as a mod­el ordi­nance for oth­er com­mu­ni­ties, the ordi­nance effort suc­ceed­ed at stop­ping a haz­ardous waste incin­er­a­tor while set­ting a prece­dent on local cit­i­zen suit pro­vi­sions that can be used as a mod­el elsewhere.

Tyler Cor­ners has stat­ed that they’re not giv­ing up, and that they’ll be explor­ing oth­er loca­tions, per­haps in the same coun­ty. How­ev­er, we find it hard to believe that they’d be fool­ish enough to try to build any­where in a coun­ty that is mobi­lized to stop them… which will become true of any oth­er coun­ty they may move to once they real­ize Susque­han­na Coun­ty will not wel­come them.

See news cov­er­age of this vic­to­ry in the Scran­ton Times.

Don’t try this at home… without our help.

We’d love to work with oth­er com­mu­ni­ties to get pro­tec­tive local ordi­nances passed to stop pro­posed or poten­tial pol­luters, or to even set stricter require­ments for exist­ing facil­i­ties where pos­si­ble. Local action is where the peo­ple pow­er is! Please be in touch if you’d like to work togeth­er on this approach in your com­mu­ni­ty. Do not sim­ply copy ordi­nances we’ve had passed else­where. Every com­mu­ni­ty is dif­fer­ent, so feel free to check out the resources we have on stop­ping pol­luters with local ordi­nances, but con­tact us to help devel­op a strat­e­gy that makes sense for your sit­u­a­tion. Thanks!