HARRISBURG, PA (June 30, 2021) We celebrated a big victory in mid-June with a court ruling that restored the rights of people across Pennsylvania to challenge fracked gas projects that threaten their health and their environment! Residents of Upper Bucks County and a local municipality, West Rockhill Township, had appealed a decision of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection granting an air pollution permit to the Adelphia Gateway Pipeline project for its Quakertown Compressor Station. The Adelphia Gateway Pipeline is a gas pipeline cutting through the Lehigh Valley and the Philadelphia suburbs. Compressor stations are large, polluting facilities that push the gas along the pipeline to its destination.

The Pennsylvania Environmental Hearing Board (EHB) had thrown out the appeals, saying that it didn’t have a right to hear them, and that only federal appeals courts could hear challenges to projects that are part of interstate gas pipelines. But the EHB is designed to make it simple for everyday people to file appeals. At the EHB, parties can bring new evidence to the judges and have a trial on the new evidence. Challenges to these projects in federal court can be more complicated and don’t allow the parties to put on new evidence and have a trial. The EHB decisions had kept the township and the residents from getting their day in court and threatened to keep other people from being able to exercise their rights to appeal harmful projects, too.

With Clean Air Council’s help, the parties appealed the EHB’s decisions to the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court. The Commonwealth Court reversed the decisions, agreeing that federal law dealing with interstate gas pipelines did not conflict with state law giving people the right to take their appeals to the EHB. The residents and the township can now move ahead with their cases at the EHB challenging the dangerous Quakertown Compressor Station, and all Pennsylvanians’ rights have been protected!

For more information contact Alex Bomstein, Senior Litigation Attorney, abomstein@cleanair.org