Council presses forward with plan for energy plant
POTTSTOWN » Borough council moved ahead with plans for a $142 million green energy plant on Keystone Boulevard this week with two votes.
Council voted unanimously to advertise the creation of a zoning “overlay district” that would allow the plant to be built; as well as entering into a “memorandum of understanding” that will guide the procedure for approving the plant.
“We’re looking at this as a wonderful improvement to the borough,” said Council President Dan Weand.
The votes follow a presentation at the April 8 council work session by Terry Planton, CEO of
SEP-1, the company that wants to build the plant on 10.33 acres at 451 Keystone Blvd.
As projected, the plant would employ 68 people full time, working in three shifts over 24 hours and have a $3.9 million payroll with an average wage of $58,000, according to Planton, who added that the company is “committed to hiring locally to fill our positions.”
When up and running, the plant would generate $39,000 a year in wage taxes for Pottstown, along with about $551,000 in property taxes, according to Planton.
Construction, which would begin in June 2021 according to the schedule, would take 18 months and employ 174 construction workers.
If the schedule holds, the plant would be up and running by January 2023.
The proposed plant creates diesel fuel from cellulose items like paper, cardboard and wood pallets by heating them, but not burning them.
It also produces a “coproduct” called “bio-char” that is used in agriculture as a soil additive, according to Planton, and will generate traffic of about 50 trucks per day.
Borough Manager Justin Keller said the memorandum of understanding adopted Monday requires SEP-1 to pay a $5 fee per truck, which he estimated will generate $90,000 to $100,000 a year to be added to the street maintenance budget.
Part of the agreement also calls for SEP-1 to conduct a traffic study of the impact its project will have on the Route 422 Armand Hammer Boulevard interchange.
But the agreement also foresees a time when that truck traffic will use another Route 422 interchange.
Under the terms of the agreement, SEP-1 will contribute $625,000 toward the cost of extending Keystone
Boulevard through West Pottsgrove to its long-planned connection to the Grosstown Road interchange with Route 422.
The cost of that extension is currently estimated at about $5.2 million.
The SEP-1 contribution will be used to leverage grant funding to pay for that extension.
“This will provide us with a match for grant applications and its important because granting agencies really like to see that developers have some skin in the game,” Keller said.
He said it is the intention of the joint PottstownWest Pottsgrove committee that will oversee planning for the project, to ask for similar contributions from other developers of properties along Keystone Boulevard.
That committee, called the KEEP Committee, was set up under the KEEP plan for Keystone Boulevard, a joint plan between the borough and West Pottsgrove Township that has been seven years in the making.
KEEP stands for Keystone Employment and Economic Plan.
The plan seeks to attract light industrial, office and residential uses to the 255 acres along the
Schuylkill River in both municipalities, and thus to help fund the extension of Keystone Boulevard to the Grosstown Road interchange with Route 422.
Keller said this proposal is the first to come in under the umbrella of that plan.
“We’re delighted Terry and his team decided to ‘Pick Pottstown’ for this enterprise,” said Keller, invoking the borough’s marketing slogan.