We completely agree with the opinion by the Times Editorial Board.
https://www.thetimes-tribune.com/…/broad-view-of-benefits-1…
Broad view of benefits
BY THE EDITORIAL BOARD / PUBLISHED: JULY 14, 2019
Who knew that dumping an extra 100 million tons of mostly out-of-state garbage in the area could produce benefits so vast that they outweigh the harms inherent in such an enterprise?
According to the state Department of Environmental “Protection,” the proposed massive expansion of the Keystone Sanitary Landfill is, in effect, a blessing to Northeast Pennsylvania. The results of its harms-benefits analysis indicate that the agency uses an extraordinarily broad definition of “benefit.”
The agency, as its name suggests, exists to protect Pennsylvania’s environment. Yet the benefits it attributed to the landfill expansion are all economic, even though some of them are not benefits, whereas most of the harms it acknowledged are environmental.
Regulators cited as a benefit, for example, the $178.6 million the landfill would pay to Throop and the $160.6 million it would pay to Dunmore in host community fees over the proposed 40-year expansion.
Host community fees exist to help those towns deal with the burdens that a massive landfill places on them. It is upfront, preemptive compensation rather than a simple benefit. If the business were anything other than a massive dump, the communities would pay the company to locate there through tax abatements and subsidies, rather than accepting payments to put up with it.
The DEP also noted that the landfill will pay hundreds of millions of dollars in wages and buy hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of equipment and supplies across the decades of expansion. It does not calculate, however, the job creation and related economic activity lost in a county dominated by waste disposal.
The proposed harms are mostly negative environmental impacts that the DEP is supposed to guard against. They include pervasive odors, potential groundwater contamination and other environmental problems but, fear not — the DEP says the landfill has plans to mitigate those actual and potential harms.
So far on this project, the DEP has managed to convert assessment of a development that will have a massive impact on the quality of life in the region into a bloodless bureaucratic process of checking off boxes. But it has the benefit of low expectations because Northeast Pennsylvanians live with the results of that approach from the lingering scars of industrial-scale mining to the exalted status that the Legislature has bestowed upon the natural gas industry.