“DEP’s assessment ignores the potential negative economic effects of the [Keystone Sanitary Landfill] expansion, which are tough to calculate in real time but not hard to forecast. How much economic activity — investment, industry, jobs — will be lost when our region is written off as the Trash Capital of the Northeast? Who would want to call such a place home?” — Excerpt from Chris Kelly’s response to Dunmore being the best place to live in PA on a $50K salary (we couldn’t agree with him more)
KELLY: King of the hill ... of trash
KELLY'S WORLD / PUBLISHED: AUGUST 28, 2019
If you earn $50,000 a year, Dunmore is the best place in Pennsylvania to call home, according to Internet bean-counters who have never set foot in Bucktown.
Last week, GOBankingRates.com, a personal finance website akin to WalletHub and NerdWallet, released the results of a “study” ranking each state’s best place to live based on the median U.S. worker salary of about $50,000.
The website’s analysts subtracted cost-of-living expenses and considered “supplemental data” like “livability and amenities.” It costs $30,695 a year to live in Dunmore, the study found. Health care costs are about 9% higher than the national average, but the crime rate is 26% below the national average.
The numbers added up to crown Dunmore king of affordability in the Keystone state. It’s nice to see a neighboring community plucked from obscurity as an attractive example, but I couldn’t help but wonder whether factoring in the proposed 40-plus-year expansion of a mountain of out-of-state trash might have changed the equation.
You’d think that might fall under “livability.”
So I called GOBankingRates spokesman Rob Poindexter, who is based in Bethlehem. As expected, he had never heard of Keystone Sanitary Landfill, or its host communities, Dunmore and Throop.
Rob explained that the study was produced by analysts in Los Angeles. where the website is based. The rankings are based primarily on economic data, and don’t consider environmental impacts like mountains of out-of-state trash.
The tight focus on income vs. cost makes it “tough to really get into hyper-localized issues,” Rob said.
He’s right. The state Department of Environmental Protection analysts proved it with their “environmental assessment” of the landfill expansion, which reads like a sales pitch for time-share condos in Chernobyl.
The newspaper covered the assessment extensively when it was released in July, but there has been little landfill news since. I thank the internet bean-counters at GOBankingRates.com for inadvertently reminding me that Northeast Pennsylvania’s most “hyper-local issue” must be revisited from time to time.
None of us can afford to ignore the iceberg of coffee grounds, take-out containers and dirty diapers that threatens to sink the region’s future.
The website’s analysts also brought into tight focus the folly of evaluating places where people live in dollars and cents alone. DEP “regulators” did just that when they touted the $178.6 million Keystone would pay to Throop and the $160.6 million the landfIll would deliver to Dunmore in host community fees over the four-decade expansion.
Keystone would also pay hundreds of millions of dollars for wages, supplies and equipment, which the regulators apparently see as ample compensation for persistent noxious odors, potential groundwater contamination, flocks of filthy gulls and other nasty facts of life around a landfill.
DEP’s assessment ignores the potential negative economic effects of the expansion, which are tough to calculate in real time but not hard to forecast. How much economic activity — investment, industry, jobs — will be lost when our region is written off as the Trash Capital of the Northeast?
Who would want to call such a place home?
I briefly lived in Dunmore when I was a rookie correspondent assigned to cover the borough. I was earning far less than $50,000 a year, but I had a decent apartment and good, welcoming neighbors.
One of the first things they told me was that Dunmore is a great place to live, but as a reporter I needed to understand that its prospects and processes are geared to serve the business interests of a man whose name I need not mention. You know who.
He owns Dunmore, they said. We just live in it and pay the bills.
If the landfill expansion permit is granted, generations will pay the consequences