Mariner East II pipeline fines totaled $42 million

A year after the Pennsylvania attorney general’s office secured $10 million to restore private waterways polluted during the construction of the Mariner East II pipeline, little of the money has flowed toward affected residents.

Lilly Riddle, a Spotlight PA State College intern, found that Pennsylvania fined Energy Transfer and its subsidiary Sunoco at least $42 million in connection to the construction of the pipeline between 2018 and 2023.

Of that sum, $10 million represents a plea agreement with Energy Transfer. Riddle reports that less than 1% of the funds have been distributed, and the attorney general’s office has not disclosed the status of the rest.

Also this week, Spotlight PA's Stephen Caruso and Kate Huangpu report on the record-breaking spending on the recent state Supreme Court race.

And finally, Pennsylvania leads the nation in Lyme disease cases, and the continued development of forested areas increases people’s risk of being bitten by the species of tick that transmits the illness.

"While we’re having the bigger fights over the big dollar spending, we can still be doing our job."

—State Rep. Peter Schweyer (D., Lehigh) on the legislature's apparent willingness to advance legislation as lawmakers hash out the final details of the long-delayed budget

» Democrats continue advancing gun control as advocates call for Pa. Senate to take up bills

In Pa. elections, it’s all about the suburbs

Every time there’s an election in Pennsylvania, Lara Putnam starts making charts. Putnam is a historian at the University of Pittsburgh, and one of her particular areas of interest is shifts in demographics and voting patterns in the commonwealth. 

Her analysis uses categories from the American Communities Project taxonomy, which sorts counties based on a long list of variables — and in particular, breaks suburbs down into lots of subgroups. These include urban suburbs, rural middle American regions, middle suburbs, and exurbs. 

In a recent conversation about this month’s municipal elections, we discussed how key policy issues have shaped results, how demographic shifts determine voting patterns, and the parts of Pennsylvania she finds most interesting. —Katie Meyer, government editor and reporter

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

KM: Recent municipal elections have been pretty negative for Democrats and good for Republicans in Pennsylvania — especially down the ballot. This started to change in 2022, and really seemed to shift this year. What were your takeaways? 

LP: I think the striking thing is that Democrats showed strength across the board this year in Pennsylvania. 

In the sort of upscale, denser, more cosmopolitan suburbs, Democrats had done super well during the Trump presidency. But then those places had sort of pulled back a little from their powered-up support for Democrats. In 2020, already, if you look at state House races, and state Senate races, Democrats no longer looked like they were pulling in new voters in those places. 

And then we saw 2021, problems for Democrats really intensified in the more rural counties in the state and some of the exurban places, like Bucks County, having become hotbeds of conservative activism, with school issues front and center. That's captured in amber in the 2021 statewide judicial results. 

But then about eight months later came the Dobbs decision. If you track voter registration figures, it's very clear that Dobbs was an absolute turning point in voter registration trends. 

KM: You analyze results using a taxonomy of different types of counties. Are there any particular counties, or types of counties, where you’ve seen voter preferences shift in particularly interesting ways? 

LP: Lancaster is actually an interesting example because of ways it has changed. It used to be categorized as a middle suburb — middling dense, middling education, middling college attainment levels. But in the American Communities Project’s update to their taxonomy, when they looked at the most recent census data from 2020 and recategorized counties, Lancaster moved from being categorized as a middle suburb to being categorized as an exurb. 

What that recognizes is that the parts of Lancaster that look more like exurbs are demographically what's growing in Lancaster. That also leads to a shift in voting preferences. People are moving toward voting, for instance, for moderate Democrats at the top of the ticket.

KM: Are these kinds of shifts happening anywhere else?

LP: Multiple counties within the Lehigh Valley also got reclassified. They had been middle suburbs, sort of the old, ex-industrial places, and are now classified as urban suburbs. The parts of those counties that have been growing are denser, more educated, and more diverse. 

With the demographics that they had 10 to 15 years ago, you wouldn't have known whether they were going to end up looking like Southwest Pennsylvania, which is sort of declining former industrial, or whether they were going to end up looking like the Philly collar — more zones of attraction for newcomers, more economic dynamism. 

What we've seen is that the Lehigh Valley is increasingly looking more like an extension of the New York suburbs, an extension of Philly suburbs. And it’s these places where you saw the biggest strength, for instance, for Democrats in this year’s [state] Supreme Court election.

BIG PAYOUT: 

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