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By JOE HEALEY jhealey@leader.net
Saturday, February 05, 2000 Page: 2A
About 40,000 acres across Northeastern Pennsylvania, including 27,000 once
set aside to protect the region’s water supply, were sold for $12.3 million by
the parent company of PG Energy, a company spokesman said.
Southern Union Co., based in Austin, Texas, purchased Pennsylvania
Enterprises Inc., the parent company of PG Energy last year. It was not clear
Friday night who purchased the land from Southern Union.
Much of the undeveloped land is around reservoirs and has an
environmentalist worried about who purchased it and how the land will be used.
“I’d hope they would keep the land in its natural form,” said Ed Zygmunt,
a member of the local chapter of the Sierra Club.
The deal does not include the timber rights, which were previously traded
to another company.
“Southern Union’s expertise lies in gas distribution,” Peter H. Kelley,
Southern Union’s president and chief operating officer, said in a statement
from the company. “The sale of this land provides the opportunity for the
development or preservation that will be in the best interests of Northeast
Pennsylvania.”
George Yankowski, a Southern Union spokesman, said Pennsylvania American
Water Co., which owns the reservoirs near the watershed, must be notified if
the new owner seeks a zoning change.
PEI had traded the timber rights to Keystone Sanitary Landfill, headed by
Louis DeNaples, for methane gas that PEI will use to run its electricity plant
in Archbald.
When Pennsylvania Gas & Water sold its water division in the mid-1990s to
Pennsylvania-American Water Co., PG Energy, the renamed gas division, retained
ownership of 46,000 of 53,000 acres. That included 27,700 acres that were
classified by the state Public Utility Commission as watershed.
As part of the conditions of the sale of the water division to Pennsylvania
American, PG Energy was required by the Public Utilities Commission to
establish a citizens committee to develop a plan for the land. After months of
study, the committee recommended much of the land remain undeveloped.
Utility and state officials have said the filtrations plants that went
online in the 1990s eliminated the need for an extensive watershed system to
protect the reservoirs.
Yankowski said all of the PG Energy’s land was sold except some land they
use for distribution. He could not say which land was kept.
The company serves about 1.2 million gas and electric customers in Texas,
Missouri, Florida and Pennsylvania, officials have said.
Call Healey at 829-7225.