Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Pipeline divides district, candidates
Chester County’s 155th Legislative District runs from the banks of the Schuylkill River in the northeast to the outskirts of Coatesville and Caln in the southwest. It is roughly cut in two by the man-made gas pipeline Mariner East, which runs on a straight line through two of its more suburban municipalities, Uwchlan and Upper Uwchlan.
The pipeline also, metaphorically speaking, divides the two candidates who are running for the 155th House District seat in the Nov. 3 election — incumbent Democratic state Rep. Danielle Friel-Otten and her Republican opponent, attorney Michael Taylor.
For Friel-Otten, Mariner East and the problems that it has caused in the community is the central reason she became politically active and challenged the former officeholder in 2018 when she became one of five Democrats to win election to the state House in firsttime races.
“I’m not political,” FrielOtten said in an interview of her opposition to the pipeline. “Never in my life did I have a dream or a desire to be a politician. I was inspired to run because of something that happened to my community, Mariner East. I had a nice life set up for myself and then this pipeline came through my yard.
“Now, it’s not an option,” she said of working to win re-election. “It’s just not an option. It’s not going to go back to normal unless we have people in office who actually are there to work for their neighbors, people and not corporations.”
Taylor, on the other hand, expresses as much concern about the fear that he contends Friel-Otten is stoking over pipeline issues as he does about pipeline safety. But Mariner East is not one of his priorities; the pipeline does not appear on his campaign literature, which focuses on jobs and law and order.
“I have always from the very beginning said that the Public Utilities Commission is responsible for (pipeline) safety regulations,” he said in an interview. “My concern with my opponent is all of her focus on the environmental issues. I think she’s is raising the level of fear when she says Mariner East has contaminated (the environment). That is stoking fear.
“What I tell people is that I will tell them the truth and I don’t want to stoke their fears,” Taylor said. “Because you can be sure that if I am elected and I tell you there is a problem, you can be sure there is a problem.”
The 155th District has eight municipalities (the townships of East Brandywine, East Pikeland, Upper Uwchlan, Uwchlan, West Brandywine and West Vincent and the boroughs of Spring City and Phoenixville (North Ward) and about 53,000 registered voters, a plurality of whom — 21,800 voters — are Republican, to the Democratic Party’s 21,323.
Unlike the other county House districts, it has not always been reliably Republican: for decades the district sent Democrat Sam Morris, founder of the French and Pickering Creeks Trust, to Harrisburg.
Friel-Otten, 43, of Uwchlan was a self-employed marketing consultant before running against former state Rep. Becky Corbin in her first try at elective office. She is a graduate of West Chester University and serves on four committees, including the Environmental Resources and Energy Committee
“People ask me all the time, ‘ Why do you only talk about gas and oil, oil and gas?” she said in the interview. “You should talk about the other things you care about. You should talk about education, you should talk about LGBTQ equality, you should talk about women’s reproductive freedom. And I say, I serve on the Environmental Resources and Energy Committee. The only thing we talk about is oil and gas.
“And I spend my time fighting back against really bad environmental bills,” she said. “That is what the General Assembly is always working on. I do care a lot about environmental issues, obviously. But it’s also one of the primary things that the General Assembly works on.”
Beyond her work on the pipeline and oil industry issues, Friel-Otten said she
hopes to work for education funding reform in the state if re-elected, mentioning how difficult it is to fund public schools from property taxes rather than a state general fund. And she said she pushes for ways to improve economic security, even in the wealthy district she represents.
Taylor, 43, of Uwchlan, is a first-time candidate for public office, although he has been active in the Chester County Republican Committee for years. He is a graduate of Temple University School of Law and runs a private practice in Exton that focuses on small business and educational law.
“My campaign has been focused on issues, and number-one is always jobs and the economy,” he said in his interview. “I say jobs equals security, and security equals freedom. I look at the economy as the basis of our society. If you are a farmer, you are going to go out and grow corn. What is the basis of that? The soil. So the economy is like the soil of society.
“From that, we can grow our education, we can grow our social services, we can improve our roads, all those things,” he said. “But if you have a bad economy, everyone is fighting after the same thing.”
In that regard, he was critical of Gov. Tom Wolf’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I think there has been too much of a stranglehold on the economy,” Taylor said. “I was very concerned when the governor issued his second declaration. I think it would be better for our society if we went back to regular order.”