Potter Township's supervisors recently reflected on the journey from a small, rural community to being home to a $6 billion ethane cracker plant.
POTTER TWP. — Al Cwynar never imagined he’d have to stand up in front of 100 people at a public meeting and beg for civility, for people to stop shouting and verbally abusing each other in the normally tranquil Potter Township municipal building.
Then again, he never dreamed that one of the largest companies in the world, a multinational oil giant with business dealings on every continent except Antarctica, would be looking to bring a $6 billion investment to a rural, bucolic township with barely more than 500 residents.
To understand what Shell Chemicals and its ethane cracker plant have meant to Potter, a person has to understand what the township was like before it became home to the first petrochemical development outside the U.S. Gulf Coast in decades.
“The biggest issues were trash cans blowing down the street or your neighbor’s dog barking too loud,” Supervisor Butch Shamp said about life before Shell.
It was a township where elections were decided by fewer than 10 votes. Shamp lost re-election for supervisor in 2010 by six votes and then won his seat back in 2012 by the same margin.
“All it takes is six votes,” he said.
By 2012, the pieces were in place for a board of supervisors that would preside over the single-biggest decision in the history of the township.
There was an overwhelming amount of outside pressure and opinions, hundreds of pages of documents and policies, and one very contentious public hearing that spanned several days.
In the middle were the three township supervisors — Chairwoman Rebecca Matsco, along with Shamp and Cwynar — who still get paid only $50 per meeting.
They were tasked with deciding the future of not just Potter, but of Beaver County and, in some senses, the burgeoning petrochemical industry in all of Appalachia.
Life before Shell
When Cwynar was asked to describe Potter Township in one word, he picked “family.”
The supervisor, 63, talked fondly of growing up in the rural and quiet township. His neighbors weren’t biologically related to his family, but that didn’t stop Cwynar from calling them “aunt” and “uncle.”
“The people here are all a part of my family,” he said.
Most municipalities have community festivals or heritage celebrations during the summer. Potter does too, but they call it a “family reunion.”
For Cwynar, that feeling carried over into adulthood. For his entire tenure as supervisor, he has brought cookies to every public meeting to share with whoever shows up.
The only problem was that before Shell, public meetings were a hit-or-miss proposition. Meetings were sometimes canceled because of a lack of business to attend to, and notes would be posted on the municipal building’s doors to inform residents about the meeting status.
Residents never complained about too much development or soaring taxes. The last time Potter changed its millage rate was in the late 1990s, and even then, the rate decreased.
Squabbles brought to the attention of council were mostly confined to “domestic issues,” Matsco said, as happens in a small community where everyone knows each other.
Matsco, 57, isn’t a native. She grew up in Michigan and relocated to Pennsylvania three decades ago, but only moved to Potter in 2001. Despite that, it quickly became apparent that Potter offered a serenity not found in most places.
“For all of us who live here, whether you grew up here or moved here, it’s home for us,” she said. “It just has a sense of home. You just belong.”
That’s not to say Potter was devoid of commerce and industry. Quite the contrary, according to Shamp. Ever since its incorporation in 1912, the township always has been home to some sort of industry.
Companies, such as St. Joseph’s Lead, Koppers and Horsehead Corp., have all come and gone, while outfits like Nova Chemicals and BASF remained strategically positioned along the Ohio River.
“There was always some sort of manufacturing base here even before we were Potter Township,” Shamp said. “When Shell first started looking here, the first question they asked us was, ‘How will your residents react to a chemical plant here?’ I told them, ‘We already have two.’”
Industry had always come and gone from Potter, and the township survived. But by 2011, the writing was on the wall for Horsehead’s exit from Beaver County, with 600 jobs being eliminated in the process.
The prospect of Horsehead, a zinc-smelting facility, leaving was a shock to the supervisors. The tax base the company and its employees offered represented more than one-fifth of the township’s entire $700,000 annual budget.
“We knew what that represented in property taxes and income,” Matsco said. “Six hundred jobs gone with the tax base on its way out. We were going to lose employment, we were going to lose the value of that property. We thought we’d be stuck with a legacy cleanup.”
The last thing the supervisors wanted was a contaminated brownfield site with little prospects for redevelopment, Shamp said.
But then, in November 2011, the supervisors were paid a visit by a mysterious man from Maryland working on behalf of a major client. The man refused to name the client, saying only that it was interested in land in the area.
“He gave nothing away,” Cwynar said.
So began a process that would forever change the landscape and history of not just Potter Township, but Beaver County.
The Shell game
Butch Shamp still has the small notebook. From the earliest whispers of Shell possibly coming here, the supervisor kept detailed notes and recollections of every interaction, every meeting, every rumor.
He flipped through the pages of his notebook to March 12, 2012, only a handful of months after the supervisors met with the mysterious man from Maryland. It was a time that Shell Chemicals announced that, if it were to build an ethane cracker plant outside the Gulf Coast, the former Horsehead site would be the location.
Shamp’s notes are detailed: The supervisors got a call at 10:30 a.m. and were told to be at the Club at Shadow Lakes in Hopewell Township at 2 p.m. There would be a celebratory event there with politicians, prominent business owners and regional economic-development professionals from the Allegheny Conference.
There was “lots of back-patting,” Shamp said, although the Potter supervisors knew the celebration may have been premature.
“Potter was on the quiet side of the room,” Matsco said.
Despite all of the smiles and jubilation, there was an elephant in the room that nobody wanted to address. In order to lure Shell to Beaver County, then-Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett promised massive tax breaks under a program called the Keystone Opportunity Expansion Zone. Under the program, Shell would be exempt from paying state and local taxes, including property, sales and corporate income taxes, for 22 years. For Potter, that meant a tax base that left with Horsehead wouldn’t be replaced by Shell.
“That’s essentially an entire generation” of taxes not being paid, Shamp said. “It just struck us fairly quickly. It was a moment of 'uh-oh.'”
For her part, Matsco agreed with that assertion.
“We thought, ‘Holy smokes. The KOEZ just obliterated our tax base.’”
The problem, according to the supervisors, is that amid all of the celebration and high-level dealings, nobody thought to ask Potter Township about the KOEZ.
“They just assumed we’d go along with it,” Shamp said.
“Everybody thought it was just a no-brainer for Potter,” Cwynar added.
When the supervisors first raised concerns about the tax issue, Matsco said the reception wasn’t what they were hoping to receive.
“We were told that Potter is a small player in a bigger scheme,” she said, adding that the supervisors were under “immense pressure” to sign off on the KOEZ despite their objections. “All we were asking was that Potter be recognized and compensated for our losses. There is a community here that matters.”
The supervisors didn’t back down, and eventually the matter made it to the desk of Corbett. The three supervisors all still vividly remember the phone call in which the governor promised that Potter would be made whole.
“We said it was an election year, and we’re going to need that in writing,” Shamp said, laughing.
The compromise came in the form of a state grant that could only be used to help pay for fire, police and other public safety affairs, and an agreement by Shell that it would pay 110 percent of the annual property taxes paid by Horsehead Corp. before the company moved.
“We held their feet to the fire,” Shamp said about elected officials.
With the tax issue resolved, and with Shell agreeing to demolish and fully remediate the old Horsehead site, the supervisors didn’t sit back and rest on their laurels. They knew a tremendous amount of work remained to first understand what kind of industrial development was coming to their township, and then how to prepare themselves and Potter’s residents for its arrival.
Preparing for Shell
There would be four long years between Shell’s announcement in 2012 and the final investment decision in June 2016. The company stayed busy during that time, spending $80 million to remediate the former Horsehead site and get it ready for the cracker plant’s development.
During those years, Shell also forever altered the landscape in Potter. Entire hillsides were moved and a mile-long stretch of Route 18 was permanently realigned to better fit Shell’s designs.
Potter’s supervisors didn’t stay idle, either. Matsco and Shamp were part of a contingent that traveled to Louisiana in the summer of 2012 to see firsthand what a cracker plant is — and what it means to local communities.
The experience proved to be educational well beyond cracker plants. As Matsco tells it, she truly got to know Shamp during the trip, which laid the groundwork for a relationship that resulted in “extraordinary teamwork.”
“I found out he doesn’t like chicken,” Matsco said, laughing.
It was during this time the three supervisors realized they each brought different talents to the table. Shamp, a general contractor by trade, excelled at the business side of running the township. In comparison, Matsco excelled at external relations and dealing with other politicians and outside agencies, while Cwynar proved adept at dealing with the township’s residents.
When Matsco and Shamp returned from Louisiana, they realized that an overhaul of township ordinances was necessary for Shell’s arrival, but also to prepare for ancillary businesses that might want to locate in Potter to be close to Shell.
Throughout the years leading up to Shell’s final investment decision, the supervisors got to know Shell a little better, too. They realized that Shell strove to be a good corporate neighbor, but they also realized that the company does its homework in every possible scenario.
To that end, Shamp said if you were meeting with 10 Shell employees, three of them were there solely to write down and record the meeting.
“Every word that comes out of your mouth is captured,” Shamp said about Shell. “They never forget anything.”
Matsco agreed and said the company was never in the dark about the goings-on in Potter.
“They knew our ordinances as well as we did,” she said.
While all the signs pointed to Shell actually building the cracker plant here, it didn’t become official until June 6, 2016, when Shell announced before dawn it would build the plant.
The impact of that decision couldn’t be understated: 6,000 construction jobs, 600 permanent jobs, billions of dollars in investments by Shell and ancillary businesses. At the time, Gov. Tom Wolf called it the single-biggest investment in Pennsylvania since World War II.
Potter’s supervisors didn’t have much time to revel in the victory. It quickly became apparent that the brightest spotlight yet was about to be shone on them, and every move they made would be analyzed and critiqued.
Before Shell could officially begin construction on the plant, the multibillion-dollar international company, one of the most powerful in the world, first needed permission from Potter’s three supervisors before they could proceed.
Conditional use
Potter’s secretary remembered Shell’s conditional-use application being so heavy, she wanted to weigh it.
The application consisted of more than 200 pages of maps, documents, schematic designs and other information pertaining to every last detail of Shell’s plans for construction and operation of the cracker plant.
Per state law, Shell first had to receive permission from Potter to ensure the company stayed within guidelines and rules mandated in the township’s ordinances.
When Secretary Linda McCoy first saw the application, she didn’t know what to think.
“It was daunting,” she said.
Mike Jones, the township’s solicitor, estimated the supervisors “expended hundreds of hours in meetings and hearings, not including the time spent individually and collectively educating themselves” on the petrochemical industry.
The supervisors, along with McCoy, Jones and township engineer Dan Sell, would have several months to review the application before a public hearing in December 2016, during which the supervisors would vote to approve or deny it.
The public hearing would turn out to be so much more than anyone anticipated. It started at 3 p.m. Dec. 13 and continued until 1 a.m. the next day before the supervisors postponed a vote on the issue.
Several inches of snow didn’t deter more than 100 people from packing into the municipal building, and most of those people came with an agenda. There were plenty of people who opposed the plant, but also supporters who came to tout the economic benefits of the project.
The problem was that the two sides shouted over one another and sometimes interrupted each other during public comments. The meeting got so contentious that Cwynar later had to beg the crowd for civility and order.
The hearing resumed the next day and lasted another three hours before everyone had their chance to speak, and after the supervisors had asked Shell officials an abundance of questions.
“I remember all of us standing there,” McCoy said recently. “We were so exhausted we were leaning against the walls.”
Looking back, Matsco said she doesn’t regret anything about the public hearing. The supervisors had heard rumors of “busloads” of protesters coming to the public hearings, so they were ready for whatever they encountered.
“Our posture didn’t need to be defensive. We are a community; we need to welcome them,” Matsco said.
Matsco said even today she’s proud that every single person who wanted to speak got the opportunity during the hearing.
“We knew everybody was watching us,” she said. “We needed to make sure we were consistent.”
The supervisors ended up approving Shell’s application but not before enacting stipulations. For instance, they mandated that Shell keep noise and light pollution within the limits allowed under Potter’s ordinances, even though Shell was asking for permission to exceed noise limits during construction.
“We knew the decisions we’d make would have regional implications,” Matsco said. “This decision could not be made in a vacuum.”
Despite the supervisors’ acknowledgement of that, at least one county resident is still scratching her head that three township supervisors had so much power in greenlighting the project.
Terrie Baumgardner, a member of the Beaver County Marcellus Awareness Community, attended the conditional-use hearings in 2016 and said she’s still flabbergasted how the process played out.
“Many Beaver Countians and southwest Pennsylvanians who so passionately and eloquently denounced plans for the cracker plant in multiple meetings were amazed that the fate of hundreds of thousands could rest in the hands of three supervisors governing a township of 500,” she said. “Most Americans would be equally astonished by this fact.”
Baumgardner said even now, she still wonders “what kind of representative governing process allows three supervisors of a tiny township to hold in their hands the fate of an entire tri-state region.”
The conditional-use process served as the culmination of an undertaking that started in 2012. Shell officially would start construction on the cracker plant several months later, a process that is still ongoing.
That’s not to say the supervisors kicked back and watched the cranes go up at the cracker site. Their work continues on acting as a buffer between Shell and local residents, and in keeping tabs on construction and how it pertains to their ordinances.
“Our role has been helping the community know what’s coming next, being in touch with Shell about what folks can expect and how we can work with them,” Matsco said.
One of the only things left, she added, is to integrate Shell employees into their new community.
For its part, Shell said it appreciates the working relationship the company has with the township.
“Our work together has spanned more than five years to create mutual understanding and benefit, and we appreciate their dedication,” spokesman Joe Minnitte said. “They have given invaluable input to the project, and we look forward to continuing our relationship for many years to come.”
Looking back
Cwynar was asked recently if, growing up in the 1950s, he ever could have imagined something as big, something as transformational, as Shell coming to Potter Township.
He smiled and shook his head back and forth, taking several seconds to answer.
“I never, ever would have thought it,” he said.
It also isn’t lost on the supervisors what they’ve been through in the last six years. People across the world know where Potter Township is now, Matsco said, even if some still erroneously refer to the cracker plant as being in Monaca.
It’s not just international attention, however. For the first time, Shamp said people in Beaver County are paying attention to Potter.
“People in Beaver County know where Potter is now,” he said with a laugh. “It’s not just Raccoon Township, then Center Township.”
Jones, who has acted as Potter’s solicitor since 2000, said the smooth flow of the entire process is directly attributable to how the supervisors acted over those six years.
“Over the years, I’ve come to know very well the citizens and elected officials of Potter Township,” he said. “What they have experienced and accomplished together through this process is a testament to the character of their community and their leaders.”
The supervisors said they couldn’t have foreseen how the process made them grow as public officials, but also how it made them grow personally. They gained new knowledge, new efficiency in their roles and, most important, new friendships.
“We all respect each other very much,” Matsco said.
Shamp agreed and said the experience of the last six years will be something he’ll never forget.
“I wouldn’t have wanted to go through this process with any other two people,” he said.