Comas, Jordi, Office of Environmental Justice, Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, 208 W 3rd St., Williamsport, PA 17701, jcomas@pa.gov.
Abandoned Mines and their discharges (AMD) in Pennsylvania have well-known and documented natural, economic, aesthetic, and social negative impacts. Since the inception of the mining industry, community and labor groups have both lost and won a variety of struggles to mitigate the negative impacts of mining and especially AMLs. In the last twenty years, activists and advocates starting in California forged a new implementation tool, a community benefit agreement, which uses a legal contract to bind a developer to a process of defining and delivering community benefits. Those benefits can range from wage floor guarantees to cash infusions for municipal or civic efforts to design considerations for facilities. Since the historic federal investments in IIJA and BILL, the Department of Energy has reinforced the visibility and use of Community Benefit Agreements or Plans as a bonus or requirement for certain grants and investments. In this presentation, the core elements of a community benefit agreement will be reviewed. It will focus on both what is positive as well as what are loopholes or pitfalls from Community Benefit Plans or Agreements, starting with the slippery slope of using non-binding forms of community benefit tools that are not legal agreements to do a kind of shallow community engagement.
policy, community benefits, abandoned mines, innovation
