Tremont area residents used a town hall hosted by a grassroots Schuylkill County organization last Friday to share their concerns and vent frustrations about the planned ICE detention center in Tremont Township.
No Skook Detention organized Friday’s town hall, which played host to more than 80 people – including all three County Commissioners and their Solicitor Paul Datte, State Rep. JoAnn Stehr, all three Tremont Township supervisors, and several Tremont Borough officials – attended the two-hour event.
While tempers could have boiled over from a rather contentious public comment period at the Schuylkill County Commissioners meeting just 48 hours earlier, they didn’t on Friday.
The activist group has avoided getting drawn into the type of rather redundant debates that happen in the Comments sections on social media and did so again at its event last week. On Friday, there was basically one simple rule regarding comments: no discussion of immigration policy. Instead, the focus of Friday’s town hall was on the local impacts the facility might have.
For more than an hour, residents and other concerned citizens spoke about their reasons for opposing the proposed ICE detention center at the former Big Lots Distribution Center. Those concerns ranged from local tax revenue loss, the impact on local water supplies, sewage system capacity, and other infrastructure, plus the strain on emergency services – about which Tremont Mayor Justin Moeller spoke – to the treatment of the 7,500 detainees ICE plans to house there.
Brianna DelValle, of Orwigsburg and one of the organizers of No Skook Detention, led the discussion by sharing a timeline of events related to the ICE facility in Schuylkill County up to that point in time. She also emphasized some of the concerns that have been raised regarding the logistics of the proposed facility, based on the plans that have been made public, albeit through third-party sources. ICE has not spoken publicly to the community other than through the County Commissioners since it completed its purchase of the Big Lots warehouse.
Water is a major concern. The lack of freshwater available in the area of the proposed ICE detention center is what prompted a recent order from the state’s Dept. of Environmental Protection to Schuylkill County Municipal Authority to not serve the facility with fresh water until it acquires permits and proves it won’t deplete the supply for the rest of the customers already served there.
An alternative is to have fresh water trucked in to the ICE facility. But DelValle told those at the town hall that bringing in the 900,000 gallons of fresh water daily that would be required, based on what DEP has told SCMA through its stop order issued earlier this month, it would take 150 6,000-gallon tankers every day to supply that much. That’s about 1 tanker truck every 10 minutes, she said.
DelValle then said that what goes in inevitably comes out and showed a slide to the audience featuring 150 tiny truck graphics with the poop emoji on each to indicate how that wastewater would need to be transported away from the detention center because the volume it would create would also overload the sewage system, too.
A common theme among those who spoke out on Friday was the unknown.
Commissioner Gary Hess, who has come out publicly opposing the facility, said ICE owes the western Schuylkill County community more than what it’s given so far as far as public outreach.
All information about the facility has either come through a third party, either from County Commissioners or notes on it delivered by Congressman Dan Meuser’s office. Hess said the agency should have been front-and-center and it hasn’t.
“What it does is put a stake in your heart,” Hess said.
Joe Wiscount, of Tremont, echoed that feeling. He said the ICE detention center is just the latest example of the area being “dumped on.”
“All of us in this area are sick and tired of repeatedly being dumped on with other people suffering the consequences of that and reaping none of the real rewards,” he said. “It’s with good reason that we don’t trust promises made without actions.”
Tom Pribilla, a Tremont business owner, said he’s worried about property values decreasing as a result of their proximity to the detention center. And he expressed concern about the potential of ICE pulling out of the facility in a few years when a new Presidential administration takes office.
Nicole Mancer, a teacher at Pine Grove Area Middle School, said she’s worried that the lost tax revenue could result in changes within the district.
“I just don’t know what’s going to happen,” she said.
Coal Region Canary has reached out to school board members at Pine Grove Area. Board treasurer Dave Frew said recently that he does not expect the lost tax revenue to result in any cuts to staff or programs at any of the district’s schools.
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