Shell's Cracker Tax Break Means Lost Revenue For Beaver County Community

• Scott Detrow
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  Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.
  
  Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.
  
  Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

Shell is considering building a multi-billion dollar chemical processing plant in Beaver County. Pennsylvania’s pitch to the company revolves around two major tax breaks: a $2.10-a-barrel tax break on ethane Shell purchases from Pennsylvania drillers, and a 15-year tax exemption called a “Keystone Opportunity Zone.”
As the Post-Gazette’s Pipeline reports, that second tax break translate to a lot of lost revenue for the community where the ethane cracker would be built:

Central Valley School District would lose $275,000 in property taxes if the land for the proposed ethane “cracker” plant becomes a tax-exempt Keystone Opportunity Zone. Potter would lose about $40,000 in property tax revenue — about 7 percent of the annual budget for the rural township.
Those dollar figures represent the property taxes currently paid by the Horsehead Corp., officials told members of the House Appropriations Committee during a hearing Tuesday at the Community College of Beaver County in Monaca. The zinc smelting company has remaining operations that cover about 300 acres and still have about 600 employees.
If the Horsehead land is eventually used to house the Shell project, businesses there would be exempt from state and local property taxes for 15 years under legislation proposed by Gov. Tom Corbett and passed by the Legislature in February. An additional 25-year tax break on ethane purchased for the facility was passed in June.
The exemptions are expected to exceed more than $1 billion.

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