There’s a fascinating – if not troubling – behind-the-scenes look at how Pennsylvania officials secretly worked to give taxpayer dollars to another multibillion-dollar, multinational company.
The tale, as reported in the Post-Gazette, involves plenty of hush-hush (Shhhhh! Secret!) correspondence among local, county and state officials last year at this time in an attempt to entice ExxonMobil to consider building a petrochemical plant along the Monongahela River in either Washington or Greene counties.
And from all appearances, had the efforts been successful – for the record, ExxonMobil says it has no plans for such a local facility — it would have followed in the steps of the heavily taxpayer-underwritten ($1.6 billion; “billion” with a “b”) Shell petrochemical facility now under construction along the Ohio River in Beaver County.
The dealings were exposed in an open records request filed by the Clean Air Council of Philadelphia.
Code-named “Project West,” government officials were promising confidentiality in the offer of public money – “strong support for project delivery,” in the parlance of one official. That, even though ExxonMobil didn’t necessarily ask for a non-disclosure agreement.
A Clean Air Council attorney referred to the dealings as the work of a “shadow sphere of people.”
Never mind that these “shadow” people are public officials who must operate in total sunshine.
And though the council attorney’s overriding message appears to be that a petrochemical future for the region is bad, bad, bad – a position to which we do not subscribe — here’s a pretty spot-on assessment about these subterranean government dealings:
“Why is it in the interest of state government to try to push this into the realm of inaccessible information? Who does that benefit?” he asked. “Because it doesn’t benefit the public.”
Sound public policy demands transparency in government. That it took an open records request to expose yet another exercise in attempted corporate wealthfare is not encouraging that the public officials involved have any fealty to the concept.
Transparency builds trust in our public processes. This latest example of official government obfuscation affirms that a healthy distrust of government is well-placed.
As for all that public money being thrown at petrochemical plants, the bottom line remains this:
If such facilities are the economic development be-all and end-all that their backers claim, why are taxpayers expected to be their venture capitalists?
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
