Farmers, business owners talk overreach in Greene Twp.

PHOTO PROVIDED
From left, Coreena Meyer, local business owner and dairy farmer; Duane Eichenlaub, regulatory and sustainability manager at Nicholas Meat; and Justin Snook, Greene Township farmer and Clinton County Farm Bureau president, are pictured during a press conference in the township.

LOGANTON — Local farmers and an employer in Greene Township are concerned about what they feel are roadblocks put in place by the township’s board of supervisors.

These farmers, along with Nicholas Meat, addressed media and community members in Loganton on Thursday, during a briefing where they expressed concern about what they see as an overzealous overreach by the supervisors that is negatively impacting area farmers and businesses.

They held the event, stating they wanted more people to realize what was happening.

“We are very concerned about the direction things are going in our township,” said Coreena Meyer, local business owner and dairy farmer. “I am very frustrated, as are many farmers in this community who are affected by the overzealous anti-agricultural ordinances imposed upon every farmer and landowner in Greene Township.”

Meyer explained that one source of frustration stemmed from a new Stormwater Management Ordinance enacted in October 2022 at the recommendation of the township engineer, Todd Pysher of Pysher & Associates LLC.

According to Meyer, the ordinance was initially created for Centre County, which includes State College, a highly populated city and not an agricultural community.

“This ordinance is not agriculturally friendly, and it is very unfriendly to farmers in general,” said Meyer. “One farmer who built a barn was mandated by the township engineer to put in retention ponds, which cost him more than $40,000. However, when the Conservation District Manager did an overlay of the property, they determined that there were no resource concerns. This farmer was forced to not only incur the financial burden but also lose the use of the farm ground that is now taken up by those retention ponds, which are useless.”

Another farmer has been trying to complete a project on their farm for more than 18 months, but it is still not completed because the township engineer changes the requirements or tries to have other agencies get involved causing delays, Meyer said.

Justin Snook, Greene Township farmer and Clinton County Farm Bureau president, also spoke at the briefing, underscoring the importance of agriculture to the community.

“The agriculture industry represents a critical component to the Pennsylvania economy and rural communities like Greene Township,” said Snook. “Given what is happening locally, I know of farmers who are not pursuing improvements on their farms because they don’t want to deal with the unrealistic requirements of the township. It’s not worth the frustration and the added financial burden.”

Snook also spoke of a new ordinance that he said many may not be aware of requiring farmers and others in the township to pay a bond of $12,500 a mile for the roads they use.

“Anybody that’s over 10 tons is probably going to get a letter saying they have to bond the roads they drive on,” added Snook. “I certainly can’t afford that, (most other farmers) can’t afford that.”

Among the issues is another ordinance by the township that has halted the construction of a state-of-the-art sustainable resource facility (SRF) at Nicholas Meat.

This is an environmental system designed to deliver numerous benefits, including reducing truck traffic in the community and reducing odor from the plant.

“Three years ago, almost to the day, we broke ground on an innovative sustainable resource facility that will provide important benefits to this community and our environment, but unfortunately, construction of this facility — one that has met and received all necessary approvals from state and federal agencies — has been brought to a standstill in what we believe is overzealous control imposed by the Greene Township Supervisors,” said Duane Eichenlaub, regulatory and sustainability manager at Nicholas Meat.

According to those who spoke at the press conference, the Greene Township Supervisors are preventing the project from moving forward by leveraging the Subdivision and Land Development Ordinance (SALDO) to impose an improvement guarantee on Nicholas Meat before construction can resume.

“In other words, they want money upfront as a security to ensure the project is completed,” said Eichenlaub. “This is a clear misapplication of the ordinance, as improvement guarantees are required only or designated public improvements. It truly is a case where local control is out of control.”

The SALDO is intended to protect the township and public entities if public improvement projects like subdivisions are not completed, leaving the township with unfunded public obligations.

“But the SRF is a private project being constructed on private property with private funding by a private business,” he said. “The project poses absolutely no financial risk to the township. In the highly unlikely event that the SRF is not completed, the Greene Township Supervisors are on record saying they would not complete the project.”

As referenced in the Pennsylvania Municipalities Planning Code (MPC), the requirement of an improvement guarantee on a private project as unique as the SRF is “unreasonable and causes undue hardship.”

Nicholas Meat will appear before the Greene Township Supervisors at their regular meeting tonight 7 p.m. to discuss the matter and request they rescind the requirement for the improvement guarantee by granting the waiver identified in both the MPC and the Greene Township ordinance.

Pennsylvania Farm Bureau Regulatory Affairs Specialist Grant Gulibon told the group that he is aware of similar overcontrol issues in other Pennsylvania townships, which he said are not in sync with the ambitions of state leaders.

“At a time when the governor, state legislators of both parties and the business community are all in broad agreement that Pennsylvania can — and must — improve its competitiveness by removing barriers to economic growth and opportunity, it is incredible that municipalities like Greene Township are moving in exactly the opposite direction by making it harder for farmers and other agricultural businesses to get projects approved by imposing additional costs and delays on them in the process,” Gulibon said. “Given the importance of agriculture to Pennsylvania’s economy in general — an importance that the Shapiro Administration recognized by including agriculture as one of the five “pillars” of its new statewide economic development strategy — and Greene Township in particular, it is stunning to see obstacle after obstacle thrown in front of employers like Nicholas Meat, who are doing exactly what so many elected officials claim to want for their communities — investing their own funds in a project that expands a critically needed service in an environmentally sustainable way. The case of Nicholas Meats and Greene Township perfectly illustrates why Pennsylvania continues to lose jobs, opportunities, and residents to other states that remove roadblocks standing in the way of growth and development, rather than create new ones.”