$500K grant to address Mercer County hazardous properties
Penn-Northwest Development Corporation received a $500,000 EPA Brownfields Grant. A brownfield is a property, the expansion, redevelopment or reuse of which may be complicated by the presence or potential presence of a hazardous substance, pollutant, or contaminant. According to the EPA, there are more than 450,000 brownfields in the U.S.
'This is huge,' said Rod Wilt, co-executive director of Penn-Northwest, in a news release. 'We will use these funds to assist the business community over the coming fiscal year.'
Penn-Northwest has used previous Brownfields grants to conduct Phase 1 and Phase 2 assessments and cleanup.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
28 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Aussie pet food company agrees to pay $1.3 million after 'serious' environmental incident
The Environment Protection Authority (EPA) has agreed to an undertaking from an Australian pet food company that it will spend more than $1.375 million on safety equipment upgrades following an incident at its factory. The legally binding agreement was made after 300 litres of phosphoric acid spilled from a drum at the Australian Pet Brands facility in Dubbo, NSW. The acid is a common ingredient in pet food, and often used in very small quantities to improve flavour or prolong shelf-life. But the scope of the incident was so serious, emergency HAZMAT crews were called in to respond, and they discovered the liquid had spread across multiple floors. Jason Gordon, the EPA executive director of regulatory operations, described the 2023 event as a 'serious chemical spill', which therefore 'demanded' a response from emergency services. 'Fortunately, no environmental harm occurred, but the potential risk was significant,' he added. Pictures supplied to Yahoo News show the plastic tank that overflowed was severely discoloured by the spill. It occurred due to a faulty valve inside the factory's production tower. What changes will the pet food factory make? Under the agreement, Australian Pet Brands, will spend over $1 million relocating its acid dosing system from the top to the ground floor. It will also automate manual systems and improve training to reduce the likelihood of similar incidents. 'These changes will not only make the site safer for workers, but they'll also provide stronger protection for the environment by improving how chemicals are stored, handled and monitored,' Gordon said. 🥊 Aussie publican receives death threats after filming controversial act with kangaroo 🔎 Rare species with less than a thousand in the wild tracked down ☠️ Warning signs placed around Australian shopping centre after mass poisoning The company will also pay $75,000 to a local environmental charity. The EPA said the outcome holds the company to account while also helping to improve safety at the site. Australian Pet Brands has been contacted for comment. Love Australia's weird and wonderful environment? 🐊🦘😳 Get our new newsletter showcasing the week's best stories.
E&E News
4 hours ago
- E&E News
Zeldin pulls Biden-era permitting proposal
A mothballed legal clash over industrial air pollution permitting requirements dating back to President Donald Trump's first term could resume after EPA scrapped a package of proposed changes. On Monday, Administrator Lee Zeldin withdrew the 2024 draft, which would have overhauled a policy set seven years earlier that loosened the threshold for deciding whether expansions and other major upgrades at a variety of industrial facilities require permits under the agency's New Source Review program. In opting to pull the proposal, released during former President Joe Biden's tenure, Zeldin wrote that he agreed with critics who said it 'would impose additional burdens and uncertainty on regulated stationary sources without clear and justifiable corresponding benefits.' Advertisement Zeldin's move had been expected. It could now lead to a restart in dormant legal challenges to the Trump-era policy known as 'project emissions accounting' brought by environmental groups and a coalition of Democratic-leaning states.
WIRED
7 hours ago
- WIRED
EPA Employees Still in the Dark as Agency Dismantles Scientific Research Office
Jul 21, 2025 5:26 PM As the EPA moves to shut down the Office of Research and Development, leadership is unable to answer questions as basic as when it will close and how many will lose their jobs. Photograph: Tierney L. Cross/Getty Images Employees of the crucial scientific research arm of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have been left with more questions than answers as the agency moves to officially wind down the office following months of back-and-forth. On Friday evening, the EPA issued a press release announcing a reduction in force at the Office of Research and Development (ORD), citing the move as part of a larger effort to save a purported $748.8 million. On Monday, some employees at ORD, the largest office in the agency, began receiving emails detailing that they had been assigned new positions within the EPA. 'Please note, this is not an offer, but a notice of reassignment,' says a letter sent to an employee and viewed by WIRED states; the employee had previously applied to positions within the agency, as ORD employees were instructed to do in May. 'There is no action you need to take the reassignment, and there is no option to decline.' On a call with ORD administrators and staff held Monday afternoon, audio of which was obtained by WIRED, leadership—including ORD acting administrator Maureen Gwinn—was unable to answer basic questions from employees, including a timeline for when the agency planned to permanently end ORD, how many employees would be transferred to other offices, and how many would lose their jobs. Employees at ORD who spoke with WIRED say that Friday's public-facing email was the first concrete news they had heard about their organization's future. One worker told WIRED that employees often learned more from news outlets, including WIRED, 'than we do from our management.' "We wish we had more information for you," Gwinn told staff on the call. "I'll speak for myself, I wish we weren't at this point today." An EPA spokesperson, who declined to give their name, wrote in response to a series of questions from WIRED that the agency is currently offering its third voluntary resignation period, known as a DRP, which ends on July 25. 'The RIF process entails a number of specific procedures in accordance with OPM regulations,' they said. 'The next step in this process is to issue intent to RIF notices to individual employees.' That number 'won't be clear,' they said, until after the DRP process was over. 'This is not an elimination of science and research,' the spokesperson wrote. 'We are confident EPA has the resources needed to accomplish the agency's core mission of protecting human health and the environment, fulfill all statutory obligations, and make the best-informed decisions based on the gold standard of science.' At the start of the year, ORD was composed of between one and two thousand scientists at labs spread across the country as well as in Washington, DC. The branch's work provides much of the science that underpins the policy formed in the agency, from research on chemicals' impacts on human health and the environment to air quality and climate change to planning for emergencies and responding to contaminations in air, soil, and water. The office contains many groups and initiatives that are crucial to protecting the environment and human health, including a team that studies human health risks from chemicals. Several EPA scientists stressed to WIRED that ORD's current structure, which allows research to happen independent of the policy-making that occurs in other parts of the agency, is crucial to producing quality work. One told WIRED that they worked in a scientific role in an EPA policy office under the first Trump administration. There, they felt that their job was to 'try and mine the science to support a policy decision that had already been made.' The structure at ORD, they said, provides a layer of insulation between decision-makers and the scientific process. ORD was heavily singled out in Project 2025's Mandate for Leadership document, the policy blueprint that has closely anticipated the Trump administration's moves in office. It described the branch as 'precautionary, bloated, unaccountable, closed, outcome-driven, hostile to public and legislative input, and inclined to pursue political rather than purely scientific goals.' The plan did not, however, propose doing away with the organization. But in March, documents presented to the White House by agency leadership proposed dissolving ORD, resulting in backlash from Democrats in Congress. In early May, the EPA announced it would be reorganizing its structure, which administrator Lee Zeldin wrote in a Newsweek op-ed would 'improve' the agency by 'integrating scientific staff directly into our program offices." The agency said that it would create a new Office of Applied Science and Environmental Solutions (OASES), which would sit under the Office of the Administrator. Putting much of ORD's scientific work in policy offices, the scientist who previously worked in a policy office told WIRED, means that 'we're going to end up seeing science that has been unduly interested by policy interests. I don't think that's going to result in policy decisions that are empirically supportable.' Following May's reorganization announcement, ORD employees were encouraged to apply for jobs within other parts of the agency. Multiple workers who spoke with WIRED say that the job postings for these new positions were barebones, with few descriptions of what the work would actually entail. One job posting seen by WIRED labels the posting simply as 'Interdisciplinary Scientific & Engineering Positions,' with no information about the topic area, team, or scientific expertise required. The EPA's reorganization efforts were temporarily stalled by lawsuits. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court paused a preliminary injunction blocking further mass reductions in force at 17 federal agencies, including the EPA. There was one bright spot on Monday's call: ORD leadership told employees that all of the ORD-affiliated labs would be kept open, a piece of news that ran contrary to some previous reports. Still, workers say that it's becoming increasingly difficult to do science at EPA. More than 325 ORD workers—around a fifth of ORD's ranks—had taken voluntary retirements since the start of the year, according to the EPA spokesperson. A scientist told WIRED that while they usually would have had a small team helping with their field work, they've been left to handle everything alone, including 'washing dishes and labeling bottles.' Cumbersome new financial approval processes, they said, have also resulted in chemicals that they ordered being delayed for months and expensive equipment sitting without any repairs. Since taking office, Zeldin has made it clear that he intends to relax environmental regulations, especially around business: Last week, he authored an op-ed in Fox News advertising how the agency would essentially erase the Clean Air Act permitting process for power plants and data centers in order to 'make America the AI capital of the world.' ORD scientists fear that the dissolution of their office will only make this pro-business mission easier. 'If you're going to end up rolling back air quality regulations—and we know, conclusively at this point, that ozone pollution is causing premature mortality and chronic effects—if you roll back the rules, you're going to see excess cases of death and illness,' one scientist tells WIRED. 'My guess is that [EPA leadership] don't want to know the answer to the question of how bad it is going to be.'
