PA Appeals Court Finds Several Conditions Attached to Board’s Grant of Special Exception to Natural Gas Compressor Station to be Unreasonable

This post was authored by Matthew Loeser, Esq.

MarkWest Liberty Midstream and Resources, LLC is a limited liability corporation that owns and operates midstream facilities which transport, compress and process oil, gas and other substances extracted from oil and gas wells. MarkWest applied to the Board for a special exception under Section 911.D.1 of the Township’s Unified Development Ordinance (UDO) to construct and operate a natural gas compressor station roughly in the center fifteen acres of its property. In this case, MarkWest appealed from the Washington County Common Pleas Court’s order affirming the Cecil Township Zoning Hearing Board’s decision granting MarkWest’s application for special exception subject to 26 conditions. The trial court affirmed the Board’s decision, finding that the Conditions were reasonable and supported by the record.

On appeal, the Board’s first argued that, “with slight modifications, Conditions 1 through 24 were authored by MarkWest representatives, and therefore, … should be considered reasonable.” The court found, however, that MarkWest’s 2011 response to the Board’s then-proposed conditions were offered in an effort to amicably resolve the parties’ differences in obtaining the Board’s approval of its special exception application without further litigation, and MarkWest explicitly never agreed to be bound by them. The court then analyzed each of the 26 Conditions imposed by the Board, and struck down all but seven of them.

Specifically, the court found that the following conditions exceeded the Board’s authority under the UDO and the Pennsylvania Municipalities Planning Code (MPC): the condition requiring operator to retain third-party consultant to test water in wells and springs; the condition requiring operator to hire consultant to measure noise level at station; the condition requiring operator to install video surveillance monitoring equipment at site for security purposes; the condition limiting operator to installation of no more than five electric or eight gas compressor engines; the condition requiring operator of proposed natural gas compressor station to locate compressor engines no closer than 750 feet away from residences; and the condition requiring operator to limit heavy truck traffic accessing site. The remaining conditions imposed by the trial court were upheld.

Markwest Liberty Midstream and Resources, LLC v Cecil Township Zoning and Hearing Board, 184 A. 3d 1048 (PA Comnwlth 3/28/2018)