Corbett Administration Begins Public Push For Shell Tax Break

• 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.

Later today, two members of the Corbett Administration will appear in Beaver County, and make their case for why legislators need to pass a $1.7 billion tax break aimed at Royal Dutch Shell. The company is considering building an ethane cracker in the western Pennsylvania county.
StateImpact Pennsylvania will attend and cover the event.
The Corbett press push comes a day after two major developments:

• The introduction of the actual tax break legislation. As Pipeline reports, two different versions of the break have been introduced – one in the House, the other in the Senate. Representative Jim Christina’s bill provides a 25-year tax break for “Shell and other companies that locate ethane-processing facilities in Pennsylvania and buy ethane from local natural gas wells.” The second bill, from Senator Elder Vogel, does not include the 25-year time frame.
• A demand from the Corbett Administration. Capitolwire, which has by-and-large owned the cracker story over the past two weeks, reports the governor has included the tax break in a list of “must-have” bills that he wants to sign along with the state budget. That means the measure will see House and Senate votes within the next two weeks.

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