Clean Earth, based in King of Prussia, serves manufacturers such as Boeing, Merck, computer-chip makers, and hospitals. Veolia operates local water utilities in towns across the U.S., including a slice of Delaware County and northern Delaware.
Clean Earth employs around 1,800, and already uses Veolia incinerators to burn hazardous medical waste and other refuse. Enviri bought that business for $625 million in 2019. Veolia says it plans to cut $120 million in spending as it integrates Clean Earth, to make the deal more profitable.
Combined with Veolia’s existing hazardous-waste business, Veolia says it will be among the largest businesses of its kind. Veolia also bought medical-waste companies in New England and California earlier this year, and it has incinerators in Texas, Illinois, and Arkansas.
Clean Earth includes tar-contaminated soil collection treatment centers on the Schuylkill in Southwest Philadelphia; in Morrisville, Bucks County; and New Castle, Del.; and a hazardous-waste and chemical disposal site in Hatfield, Montgomery County, among 82 waste-management and 19 federally-permitted treatment sites, along with hundreds of trucks. Veolia has industrial facilities in Bridesburg and Pennsauken, among other area locations.
Veolia will pay cash worth around $15.50 a share, or $1.3 billion, to Enviri shareholders for Clean Earth; plus $1.35 billion to pay down some of Enviri’s debt load; and around $400 million to help finance Enviri as it restructures as a smaller company and issues new shares. Both boards have approved the deal, pending a vote by Enviri shareholders next spring.
The price to shareholders is a premium to Enviri’s recent share value, and triple what it was worth at its recent low in March. But it’s also less than the stock was worth as recently as 2022, before the company changed its name from Harsco and moved from central Pennsylvania to Philadelphia, where its leaders said it’s easier to recruit engineers and managers.
The sale leaves Enviri with two remaining business lines: steel-mill slag management and railroad track equipment and maintenance. The latter business faces large environmental expenses, and Enviri had earlier tried to sell it.
After selling Clean Earth to Veolia and reducing management costs, Enviri will spin off the remaining businesses into a new company, under the same name.
Announcing the deal, Enviri chief executive F. Nicholas Grasberger also said he’ll be stepping down from the company’s top job, to be succeeded by Russell Hochman, a ten-year Enviri veteran who already serves as the company’s senior vice president, top lawyer, and compliance officer.
F. Nicholas Grasberger, chairman & CEO of Enviri, at the company’s Philadelphia headquarters in 2023. He will be stepping down as the company sells its hazardous-waste division to France’s Veolia.
The restructured Enviri will have more cash to invest in its businesses and lower finance costs, Grasberger said in a statement. He praised successor Hochman’s “deep business acumen and proven ability to navigate mergers and acquisitions, regulatory matters, and transformation efforts.”
The boost in Enviri’s capital “will create enhanced opportunities” for both slag and rail, Hochman said in a statement.
Rape crisis centers in the Philadelphia region are sounding the alarm that the slight increase in funding in the recently passed state budget won’t be enough to sustain or improve crucial services for survivors of sexual assault.
The Pennsylvania Coalition to Advance Respect (PCAR), which funds rape crisis centers via the state allocation, estimates centers will only see an average increase of $5,300 from the state to support their work assisting victims of sexual violence.
The Philadelphia Center Against Sexual Violence had to lay off most of its staff and reduce services due to the nearly five-month state budget impasse. And while leaders in the region appreciate the funding — the first increase for rape crisis centers in years — it’s only a fraction of what Philly’s only rape crisis center says it needs to survive.
“Even with the budget now passed, the funding increase is minimal compared to the overwhelming need,” said LaQuisha Anthony, senior manager of advocacy at the center, in a news release last week. The center is known as WOAR, the initials of its former name, Women Organized Against Rape.
Now advocates in Philadelphia and the suburbs are turning their focus to next year’s budget, pushing for an $8 million increase in state funding to rape crisis centers, which, among other services, offer victim advocacy, legal services, and crisis hotlines. A surge in funding will help provide stability for survivors and adequately compensate staff who dedicate their lives to this work.
“An $8 million increase would help ensure that every survivor across the Commonwealth, urban, suburban, and rural, has access to care, advocacy, and prevention,” said Joyce Lukima, coalition director and chief operating officer at PCAR, in a statement.
More than $12 million of a $50.1 billion state budget was allocated to rape crisis this year, a $250,000 increase from last year. Lukima said this $250,000 will be split among 47 rape crisis centers in the state.
In a statement, a spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services, which oversees rape crisis center funding, highlighted Gov. Josh Shapiro’s history of support for survivors of sexual violence.
Gov. Josh Shapiro signs the fiscal year 2025-26 budget surrounded by General Assembly members on Nov. 12 at the Capitol in Harrisburg. The state budget had been due June 30, and Pennsylvania is the final state in the country to approve a funding deal.
“The final budget reflects the realities of working with one of the only divided legislatures in the entire country – but Gov. Shapiro will continue to fight for survivors and the Commonwealth’s rape crisis centers,” said Ali Fogarty, the DHS spokesperson.
Victim services centers in the suburbs, which also offer rape crisis services, are echoing WOAR and PCAR’s message, highlighting the urgent need for greater funding. These suburban centers receive funding from additional sources because they support victims of other crimes.
“For now, we’re doing OK, but another year of no increase in funding while the cost of living is going up has a significant impact on our staff as well as our organization,” said Penelope Ettinger, executive director of Network of Victim Assistance – Bucks County.
Trying to stay afloat
While Pennsylvania lawmakers were failing to come to an agreement on a far overdue state budget last month, rape crisis centers in Philadelphia and the suburbs were trying to make ends meet and provide services to survivors of sexual violence.
For instance, the Victim Services Center of Montgomery County had to use a line of credit, delay bill payments, institute a hiring freeze, increase the number of interns, and commit to “triaging services,” said Mary Onama, executive director.
“If they hadn’t passed the budget the time that they did, by December or January, we would have had to close, because we couldn’t go much longer,” Onama added.
At the Crime Victims’ Center of Chester County, it “added a layer of stress to an already very stressful job,” though the center did not have to reduce services, said Christine Zaccarelli, the organization’s CEO.
WOAR’s release last week said the closure of therapy and counseling services left “106 individuals wait-listed, 33 group clients waiting for services to resume, and eight child clients referred elsewhere for care.”
The center has been serving Philadelphia since 1971 and was one of the first rape crisis centers in the United States, according to the organization. Between January and October, the center said it responded to 3,820 calls on its crisis hotline.
The dysfunctional approval of the state budget, though, will have lingering effects on WOAR, warning in the news release that without a “long-term, sustainable investment,” the center won’t be able to meet a rising demand for resources.
The Bridge Loan, from the Pa. Treasury Department, provided WOAR funding owed for July through September, but it still wasn’t enough to return WOAR to full capacity, said Demetrius Archer, PCAR’s communications director. The center also brought back two employees this month, but it’s still in need of community support and is hoping to bring back more staff when possible.
“When services are underfunded, survivors and entire communities feel the impact,” said Fontan in the news release. “In a city as large and diverse as Philadelphia, every minute counts when someone is in crisis. Survivors deserve to know that when they reach out for help, someone will be there to answer.”
All eyes on Harrisburg
At Temple University’s campus Tuesday, student advocates bundled up in their coats, hats, and scarves and gathered at the Bell Tower to discuss an anti-sexual violence state bill they helped develop.
The Every Voice Bill, which primarily focuses on sexual violence prevention resources on college campuses, is even more important now that survivor services from WOAR are “unstable,” said Bella Kwok, a senior criminal justice major and president of Temple’s Student Activists Against Sexual Assault, in an interview prior to Tuesday’s event
“This bill would ensure that stability at least on an institutional level,” Kwok said.
Temple University students Emma Wentzel, left, and Bella Kwok speak at a podium on Polett Walk on Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2025, about campus sexual assault and a state bill they helped craft to strengthen protections against sexual violence at colleges.
Kwok is not the only one who is turning their attention to Harrisburg. PCAR and other rape crisis centers are continuing their push for next year’s budget to include an $8 million increase in the Pa. DHS line item for rape crisis.
As the first increase for rape crisis centers in a few years, the new budget’s funding gives advocates “hope,” even if the amount is “disappointing,” said Zaccarelli, of the Crime Victims’ Center of Chester County.
“Maybe our advocacy is making a little bit of a difference and shining a light on survivors and their needs and how important our centers are in the community,” Zaccarelli said.
Ettinger said that Bucks County’s state lawmakers have been supportive of NOVA Bucks, which had to place a hiring freeze on some positions and issue “significant” restrictions on spending due to the impasse, but that a lack of increased funding from the state is “very telling.”
“I believe that the fact that the state did not allocate a significant increase is very telling to what they believe, where they put it on the priority list,” Ettinger said.
For his part, Shapiro signed Act 122 in October 2024, which aimed to increase transparency by requiring a statewide electronic system to track evidence kits for sexual assaults, Fogarty, the DHS spokesperson said. And in December 2023, he signed Act 59, which aims to improve access to treatment for survivors of sexual assault.
It’s a “societal” problem, not a government problem, said Vincent Davalos, interim executive director of the Delaware County Victim Assistance Center.
“When we talk about sexual violence, the first thought is, of most people, is to say ‘Maybe this didn’t happen,” Davalos said. “And even if they do believe it happens… it’s just a really difficult topic for people to engage and talk about it plainly.”
This week, victim services leaders across Pennsylvania will gather in Harrisburg for an annual conference to address funding challenges among other concerns, Davalos said, noting that with more funding, his center could improve staff retention.
But this year, the newly passed state budget is likely to be top of mind.
“I think money is going to be a big topic,” Davalos said.
Former Central Bucks School District Superintendent Steven Yanni and former Jamison Elementary School principal David Heineman have appealed their terminations by the school board over their handling of abuse allegations in an autistic support classroom.
The Central Bucks school board voted to terminate the duo last month, nearly a year after a classroom aide reported the alleged abuse.
Yanni, who has accepted a position as the CEO of Northwood Academy charter school in Philadelphia, filed his appeal Monday in Bucks County Court.
The filing rehashes the arguments Yanni made during the August hearing, including that he did not make an immediate report to ChildLine, Pennsylvania’s reporting system for child abuse or neglect, because he relied on the assessment of district officials during aninternal investigation.
Yanni’s appeal alsosays he did not remove the accused teacher and educational assistant from the classroom because the members of his leadership team closest to the investigation told him there was no reason to suspect abuse.
The 139-page court filing attacks the termination hearing process and calls the school board biased. It notes that board member Jim Pepper‘s son was one of the alleged victims of abuse.
Pepper recused himself from the hearing and other votes related to the investigation, but the appeal alleges that“he actively participated in the Board’s investigation and disciplinary actions and made public allegations.”
Pepper declined to comment.
“For almost a year now, there has been inaccurate and defamatory information shared about me,” Yanni said in a statement. “My appeal corrects the record and clearly articulates the truth around the Jamison situation.”
The Central Bucks School District said it would not comment on the case because it is active litigation.
Heineman,meanwhile, challenged his termination Oct. 29 by filing a petitionthrough the Pennsylvania Department of Education’s tenure appeal process, according to a copy of his appeal obtained by The Inquirer. That process, unlike Yanni’s appeal in court, is private.
The former principal accuses the board of terminating him after 26 years as a district employee over a series of “unproven allegations” that were made at his termination hearing.
These include the notion that as principal he created a “chilling effect” that deterred staff from making reports to ChildLine, and that he threatened to fire the classroom aide for making the allegations.
Heineman‘s petition notes that in the days after the allegations of abuse were made, the district’s leadership “unanimously agreed that there was no abuse, and no need to make a ChildLine report.”
Heineman also says that there is no basis to the way he was characterized during the termination hearings.
“CBSD’s allegation that Mr. Heineman ‘does not care about children’ carries no support in the record, and appears to be, once more, inflammatory rhetoric made more for the public than for purposes of meeting CBSD’s burden to terminate Mr. Heineman,” the petition says.
Central Bucks also declined to comment on Heineman’s appeal. The attorney representing Heineman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The school district responded to the petitionthis week, according to a copy of the filing obtained by The Inquirer that denies most of Heineman’s claims and stands by the termination decision.
As for the allegation that the top leadership of the school concluded that there was no abuse before making a ChildLine report, Central Bucks says, “regrettably admitted.”
For the first time in months, the director of the Community Action Agency of Delaware County, which operates three homeless shelters and a rental assistance program, isn’t thinking about service cuts.
The organization was forced to reduce capacity at one of its shelters to 50% in October and close the other two on Nov. 1 as a result of the state budget impasse. Delaware County, which had been backfilling for missing state dollars, had to cut the funds it delivered to social service organizations in half last month.
Now, the agency is beginning to reopen its doors and its rental assistance program.
“[Employees] have been busy kind of preparing for the residents to come back,” said Ed Coleman, the nonprofit’s executive director.
The Community Action Agency is one of several nonprofit organizations across the region that were stretched and stressed over the last several months as state dollars stopped flowing in the absence of a budget. Since January, they have grappled with uncertainty over federal funds as President Donald Trump’s administration cancels grants and Congress considers major cuts to social service programs.
The dynamics exposed the vulnerabilities facing philanthropic organizations while threatening the assistance they provide to those they serve.
Last week the Pennsylvania General Assembly finally passed a budget, ending one source of uncertainty. At the Community Action Agency, this meant employees began swapping out bedding and restocking toiletry bags given to incoming residents this week, undoing significant reductions in service.
By Wednesday, Wesley House Shelter, a facility for families and single women that Community Action manages, was able to take in a senior citizen whom a church had placed in a hotel amid the budget stalemate. A former resident who had to stay with a relative until the shelter could reopen also returned to the facility.
The promise of state funds could not have come soon enough.
Coleman said since Nov. 13, the agency received a little more than 250 rental assistance requests — including almost 80 on Tuesday alone.
The organization, Coleman said, is now assessing how much it can spend on services as it waits for state dollars to begin flowing again — which is expected to happen in the next 30 to 90 daysas state agencies catch up on millions in missed payments to counties, schools, and nonprofits.
“We really don’t get paid very quickly with most of the contracts we have,” Coleman said.
The rebuilding mirrors what nonprofits across the Philly region are managing after the state budget impasse. Several nonprofit organizations told The Inquirer they had to freeze hiring and take out lines of debt. Nearly all reported burnout among staff as need increased and uncertainty over funding loomed large.
“In many ways, it felt similar to the early months of COVID,” said Jennifer King, executive director of the Council of Southeast Pennsylvania.
The Bucks County Opportunity Council was forced to reduce the number of individuals it could provide rent assistance to.
And at A Woman’s Place, a domestic violence shelter in Montgomery County, more people were showing up at the shelter door, even if they weren’t domestic violence survivors, asking for help the shelter was not equipped to provide. Often, she said, staff did not even have an answer of where to send people because of the reduction in services across the board.
“That takes a toll on staff, and they start thinking, ‘Do I really want to do this work?’” said Beth Sturman, the shelter’s executive director.
Providers worried most about the impact the freeze had on those they served. Jill Whitcomb, presidentand CEO of Surrey Senior Services in Delaware County, said older adults are facing greater stress and anxiety as a result of state and federal services being rolled back.
“Our mission is to help people remain at home and independent and engaged as long as they possibly can or want to,” Whitcomb said. “That becomes really hard on a limited income when those incomes are already tenuous, and then they’re living with the anxiety about losing their Social Security.”
Jeannine Litski, president of Mental Health Partnerships, said the closure of shelters in the region resulted in greater trauma to unhoused people.
“Imagine you’re just holding on by a thread, and you have at least a place you can lay on a cot for the night and you have a little food, and now that’s taken away,” she said.
While philanthropic organizations were grateful for the state budget deal, they remained anxious about the possibility of another federal government shutdown at the end of January and questioned how much more they could take.
“We got through COVID. Let’s see if we can get through this,” Whitcomb said. “It’d be interesting to talk five years from now and see where everybody is.”
This suburban content is produced with support from the Leslie Miller and Richard Worley Foundation and The Lenfest Institute for Journalism. Editorial content is created independently of the project donors. Gifts to support The Inquirer’s high-impact journalism can be made at inquirer.com/donate. A list of Lenfest Institute donors can be found at lenfestinstitute.org/supporters.
When a Marriott representative visited the construction site of the W Philadelphia hotel in Center City in January 2019, months after the project should have been completed, the concrete floors were so uneven that a pen placed on the ground rolled downhill.
The construction of Philadelphia’s largest hotel, home of the W and the Element, both part of the Marriott umbrella, began in 2015 and had a strict 2018 deadline for completion. Delays led to an avalanche of nearly 30 lawsuits with the site’s owner, construction contractor, and design company pointing fingers at each other.
The W, which comprises 295 rooms of the 51-story building, eventually opened in 2021, roughly three years late.
Bringing to a close 25 of the lawsuits, a Philadelphia judge issued a 69-page memo last weeklaying out the saga and finding the construction company responsible for the project going “off the rails.”
Common Pleas Court Judge James Crumlishfound that the construction contractor, Tutor Perini Building Corp., subcontracted the concrete work to a company that botched the job. And despite knowing about the problems, which were detrimental to the entire project, Tutor denied the issues for months.
The judge’s finding comes after trial testimonies that took five months as the parties “turned this litigation into a challenging behemoth that made any effort at resolution impossible,” Crumlish wrote.
A yearslong saga
The saga began when Chestlen Development LP, the owner of the site, picked Tutor as the construction manager. The agreement capped the cost of construction at $239 million and required completion within 1,017 days after April 2015.
An attorney for Tutor did not respond to a request for comment.
From the outset, Tutor suffered “chronic turnover of its personnel,” the judge wrote, resulting in the loss of “institutional knowledge of key decisions.”
Tutored subcontracted the concrete work to Thomas P. Carney Inc. Construction, a Bucks County company.
When a different subcontractor, Ventana DBS LLC, began installing the wall-window systems, they immediately noticed a “big problem,” according to the judge’s memo. In many places the concrete wasn’t level or did not meet the elevation requirements in the design.
Tutor pushed back, denying that there was a problem, while quietly attempting to grind the edges of the concrete slabs to address the issue.
While denying the problem, Tutor hired outside advisers to evaluate the concrete work. But they confirmed the problem too.
Finally, in March 2018, Tutor shared the outside reports that acknowledgedCarney’s shoddyconcrete work with Chestlen’s representative for the project.
As summer 2018 began, it was clear that the project would not be completed on deadline.
In September 2018 Tutor asked Chestlen for an extension, which the owner rejected, saying the request came “months if not years after some of the concrete issues started to become apparent,” according to Crumlish’s memo.
The remediation of the floor began in April 2019 andwas completed in October.
The sidewalk area of W Philadelphia and Element Philadelphia Hotel under construction, looking northwest along the 1400 block of Chestnut Street July 2, 2019.
The building finally obtained a certificate of occupancy in April 2021. But Marriott couldn’t open the W until August because over a hundred window vents were inoperable because Tutor failed to follow the design.
“Tutor knew that the floors did not meet specifications but did not timely disclose its knowledge to Chestlen or consult with it,” Crumlish wrote. The judge further found that Tutor refused to work with contractors to remediate the problems in 2017 and 2018, and proceeded to install interiors over the deficient concrete floors.
The blame game
Throughout the litigation, the parties all blamed one another for various problems and aspects of the delay.
Costs and liens piled up.
Chestlen paid Tutor $239 million for the construction, accrued over $40 million in damages as set in its contract with Tutor, and paid tens of millions to remediate the floors. The property is “clouded with over $155 million in liens,” according to the judge’s memo.
Crumlish concluded that Tutor breached its contract when it failed to oversee the concrete work and the window-wall installation, and generally didn’t fulfill its obligations.
“Every delay in the performance and completion of the project is the responsibility of Tutor and Carney,” the judge said. The judge will decide on the amount of damages following hearings scheduled for January.
Chestlen’s attorney was unavailable to provide comment. Carney did not respond to a request for comment.
The W hotel is located where One Meridian Plaza used to be, before that building suffered a devastating fire in 1991 and was finally demolished in 1999.
Filling the vacant lot, a mere block from City Hall, became a top priority for policymakers during Mayor Michael Nutter’s time in office. The hotel proposal eventually received $75 million in taxpayer support across local, state, and federal funding sources in addition to other legislative assistance.
The project was developed by Brook Lenfest, son of the former Inquirer owner H.F. “Gerry” Lenfest, whose foundation continues to own the newspaper today.
More than 2.5 million miles of fuel pipelines run under homes, farms, parks, and schools in the United States — enough steel line to circle the earth 100 times.
One of those pipelines slices under Mount Eyre Manor, a suburban Bucks County neighborhood perched high above the popular Delaware Canal State Park towpath and only a few thousand feet from the Delaware River.
For years, residents barely gave any thought to the Twin Oaks Pipeline, owned by Sunoco and its parent company, Energy Transfer. That changed in January when state inspectors uncovered a jet fuel leak.
Now, the pipeline is always on their minds.
“We will never drink the water in this house again,” said Kristine Wojnovich, whose well was one of six tainted in the leak. Six metal tanks, part of a filtration system installed by Energy Transfer, now crowd her basement wall.
The Twin Oaks Pipeline stretches 106 miles. Built in 1958, its 14-inch diameter pipe carries jet fuel, diesel, or gasoline, depending on need, from Sunoco’s Twin Oaks Terminal in Aston, Delaware County, to a terminal in Newark, N.J.
Along its route, the pipeline burrows beneath suburbs, tunnels under waterways — including the Delaware River — and runs below a school’s grounds and state and local parks. It carves directly through Mount Eyre in the Washington Crossing section of Upper Makefield Township.
Federal regulators estimated that a “slow drip” had seeped undetected at least 16 months before the leak was detected.
Energy Transfer has accepted responsibility and apologized at public meetings. The company declined to comment for this article but noted that it has set up a website with updates and documents related to the spill.
A contractor for Energy Transfer working on a recovery well in front of Kristine Wojnovich’s home in the Mount Eyre Manor neighborhood.
Signs of contamination
Wojnovich said she first noticed “something off with the water” as she was getting a drink after a workout in September 2023. She recalled the incident on a recent day from her living room as several white trucks owned by an Energy Transfer contractor were parked outside as part of well-monitoring work.
“It smelled to me like oil or gasoline or some kind of petroleum,” Wojnovich said.
Uncertain whether she was imagining it, she waited for her husband, Kevin, to return home. He, too, noticed the odor and suggested they call Sunoco.
The couple say Sunoco failed to locate a source of the odor and told them the likely cause was bacteria. Other neighbors had complained, too.
But it wasn’t until Jan. 21, 2025, that residents first learned of a leak discovered during an investigation by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. The DEP advised the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) that water samples from a Mount Eyre home “indicated the presence of kerosene, a major component of JP-8 jet fuel.”
PHMSA notified Energy Transfer and Sunoco.
Since then, residents have attended hours and hours of meetings. They’ve filed seven lawsuits, including a class action. Wojnovich is one of the plaintiffs.
Most people won’t drink the water. Many won’t cook with it. Wojnovich and her husband, Kevin, bathe elsewhere.
Wojnovich noted that when her well was initially tested after the leak, “fumes came out. It was overwhelming. They measured 12½ feet of jet fuel on top of our drinking water well.”
Her water, which eventually tested positive for contamination, now gets routinely tested by contractors paid by Energy Transfer. The company has drilled a second well for the family. But the Wojnoviches say their water still has a pungent odor.
Kevin Wojnovich samples water from a point-of-entry-treatment, whole-house filtration system that Sunoco installed at his Washington Crossing home after a 2024 jet fuel leak was detected in the company’s Twin Oaks pipeline.
The fallout
Of six wells that tested positive for hydrocarbons, four exceeded contaminant levels for drinking water. Residents suspect other wells were, or are, tainted and are skeptical about the way testing has been carried out.
According to the DEP, jet fuel contains “contaminants of concern” including benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, xylenes, cumene, naphthalene, trimethylbenzenes, dichloroethanes, dibromoethane, and lead, which is also naturally occurring. The compounds can be harmful if ingested in large amounts. Some are carcinogens.
Energy Transfer has purchased a home with a contaminated well on Spencer Road, adjacent to where the leak was detected, for $721,800. It is across from the Wojnoviches’ home and sits vacant. The company purchased the home to drill two recovery wells in order to remove contaminated water.
Since digging up and repairing the pipe section, the company has recovered 1,027 gallons of fuel. About 163 gallons came from private wells, according to DEP records.
Energy Transfer has paid contractors to excavate and remove 276 tons of petroleum-impacted soil, according to a DEP document. It has installed four wells to recover petroleum from underground, dug 26 wells to monitor groundwater, and put in 181 point-of-entry treatment filtration systems in homes. It has collected 1,289 water samples from 363 individual wells.
A map from the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration shows the Mount Eyre Manor neighborhood in Washington Crossing, Bucks County, and Sunoco’s Twin Oaks pipeline in red. The blue line signifies another gas transmission pipeline.
Over the summer, Energy Transfer, using an inspection tool, identified multiple anomalies in the pipeline in Upper Makefield Township that required excavation, according to an Oct. 22 update.
The company said in an August letter that the anomalies presented no immediate danger and that there is no “data or information that the continued operation of the pipeline presents a critical safety concern or that the pipeline is leaking.”
One of those excavations took place in a section of pipe next to the popular canal path used by cyclists and hikers. It is being dug up and replaced.
The excavation along Taylorsville Road won’t disturb the canal trail, company officials said during a recent meeting. The term anomaly does not mean a pipe section is an immediate threat to the safety or integrity of the pipeline, Matt Gordon, vice president of operations at Energy Transfer, said at the meeting.
Meanwhile, the pipeline continues to deliver fuel.
A contractor for Energy Transfer excavates a pipe found along Taylorsville Road with an anomaly that the company said was not in any immediate danger of failing.
‘Another house is up for sale’
The spill has upended life in and around Mount Eyre, neighbors say.
Joe Babiasz said many neighbors had bonded through their children’s schools and activities before the spill. Now, instead of talking soccer, they talk pipelines.
“It’s become part of daily life at this point,” Babiasz said. “When we get together socially, it’s the thing we talk about. It’s been kind of hard to just hang out with people and have it not come up. You can’t walk around the neighborhood without seeing a reminder. ‘Oh, there’s the monitoring well,’ or ‘another house is up for sale.’”
Residents have expressed outrage and skepticism toward Energy Transfer, the parent company of Sunoco, over the handling and testing of the contamination. They say theydon’t trust the company’s methods and doubt the safety of the 67-year-old pipeline.
“There are the trucks out there now,” Babiasz said on a recent day. “You can see them or hear them. It’s been integrated into our daily life.”
He asked: “Are they actually telling us everything?”
Residents wonder if the leak would have been discovered if they had municipal water. They wonder whether the leak created a toxic plume underground and where it might drift to, including into the river.
Neighbors plan to attend the next update by the DEP during a Dec. 8 webinar.
Katherine LaHart, a plaintiff in the class-action suit, said her well water was once clear. Now it is “black — Texas brown.”
“I worry every day about the integrity of our water, air and soil and the pipeline that runs through our neighborhood,” LaHart said. “It keeps me up at night.”
A woman who was found dead inside an abandoned car in Lower Makefield on Sunday had been killed hours earlier by her boyfriend in Trenton, police said Monday.
Lamont Truitt, of Trenton, has been charged with murder, attempted murder, carjacking, and related crimes in the shooting death of Alyssia Murphy, 32. He is also charged with shooting and wounding a friend of Murphy’s who had been sitting with her in a Toyota Camry that police say he stole after the shooting.
Truitt, 36, remained in custody Monday, awaiting a detention hearing in Mercer County.
A passerby found Murphy’s body inside the abandoned Camry early Sunday near an access road to the Delaware Canal, according to police in the Bucks County township. She had been shot multiple times.
Trenton police say the shooting happened just before 6 a.m. on Coolidge Avenue near Oakland Street in the capital city.
Murphy’s friend, whom police did not identify, said she was sitting in the car with Murphy when Truitt approached them. The couple began to argue, she said, and in the heat of their dispute, Truitt pulled out a handgun and fired multiple times at Murphy at close range.
The woman, who was shot in the leg, said she jumped out of the car and ran before Truitt sped off. She was treated at Capital Health Regional Medical Center.
A family friend who asked not to be identified out of fear of retaliation described Murphy as a kind, generous person who had long dreamed of starting a family and “certainly did not deserve to go like that.”
Should last week’s election results make Brian Fitzpatrick nervous?
Bucks County Democrats think so.
The Republican lawmaker has been like Teflon in the 1st Congressional District, which includes all of Bucks County and a sliver of Montgomery County. He persistently outperforms the rest of his party and has survived blue wave after blue wave. First elected in 2016, he has remained the last Republican representing the Philadelphia suburbs in the U.S. House.
But Democrats pulled something off this year that they hadn’t done in recent memory. They won each countywide office by around 10 percentage points — the largest win margin in a decade — and for the first time installed a Democrat, Joe Khan, as the county’s next top prosecutor.
“This year was unprecedented, and sitting here a year before the midterm, you have to believe that next year is going to be unprecedented as well,” State Sen. Steve Santarsiero, who is also the county party’s chair, said Wednesday.
Eli Cousin, a spokesperson for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, predicted a “perfect storm brewing for Democrats” to beat Fitzpatrick. “He and Trump’s Republican Party are deeply underwater with Bucks County voters; he has failed to do anything to address rising costs, and we will have a political juggernaut in Gov. Josh Shapiro at the top of the ticket,” Cousin said.
There are several reasons Democrats may be exhibiting some premature confidence: Despite a spike in turnout for an off-year election, far fewer voters turn out in such elections than do in midterms. Fitzpatrick is extremely well-known in Bucks, where his late brother served before he was elected to the seat. He has won each of his last three elections by double digits.
But Tuesday was a sizable pendulum swing in the bellwether. Some of the communities, like Bensalem, that drove Trump’s victory flipped back to blue.
The last time Democrats had won a sheriff’s race in the county was 2017, a year after Trump was elected the first time. That year, Democrats won by smaller margins, and a Republican incumbent easily won reelection as district attorney. The following year, Fitzpatrick came the closest he has yet to losing a race, but still won his seat by 3 percentage points.
This year’s landslide, Democrats say, is a warning sign.
“There were Democratic surges in every place that there’s a competitive congressional seat, and that should be scaring the s— out of national Republicans,” said Democratic strategist Brendan McPhilips, who managed Democratic Sen. John Fetterman’s campaign in the state and worked on both of the last Democratic presidential campaigns here.
“The Bucks County seat has always been the toughest, but it’s certainly on the table, and there’s a lot there for Bob Harvie to harness and take advantage of.”
Bucks County Democratic Commissioner Bob Harvie speaks during an Oct. 5 rally outside the Middletown Township Police Department and Administrative Offices in Langhorne.
Harvie, a high school teacher-turned-politician, leapt on the results of the election hours after races were called, putting out a statement saying, “There is undeniable hunger for change in Bucks County.”
“The mood of the country certainly is different,” Harvie said in an interview with The Inquirer on Thursday. “What you’re seeing is definitely a referendum.”
Lack of GOP concern
But Republicans don’t appear worried.
Jim Worthington, a Trump megadonor who is deeply involved in Bucks County politics, attributes GOP losses this year to a failure in mail and in-person turnout. Fitzpatrick, he said, has a track record of running robust mail voting campaigns and separating himself from the county party apparatus.
“He’s not vulnerable,” Worthington said. “No matter who they run against him, they’re going to have their hands full.”
Heather Roberts, a spokesperson for Fitzpatrick’s campaign, noted that the lawmaker won his last election by 13 points with strong support from independent voters in 2024 — a year after Democrats performed well in the county in another off-year election. She dismissed the notion that Harvie would present a serious challenge, contending the commissioner “has no money and no message” for his campaign.
Fitzpatrick is also a prolific fundraiser. He brought in $886,049 last quarter, a large amount even for an incumbent, leading Harvie, who raised $217,745.
“Bob Harvie’s not going to win this race,” said Chris Pack, spokesperson for the Defending America PAC, which is supporting Fitzpatrick. “He has no money. He’s had two dismal fundraising quarters in a row. That’s problematic.”
Pack noted Harvie’s own internal poll, reviewed by The Inquirer, showed 57% of voters were unsure how they felt about him.
“An off-off-year election is not the same as a midterm election,” Pack said, adding he thinks Fitzpatrick’s ranking as themost bipartisan member of Congress will continue to serve him well in Bucks County.
“He’s obviously had well-documented breaks on policy with the Republican caucus in D.C., so for Bob Harvie to try to say Brian Fitzpatrick is super far right, no one’s gonna buy it,” Pack said. “They haven’t bought it every single election.”
On fundraising, Harvie said he had brought in big fundraising hauls for both of his commissioner races, and said he would have the money he needed to compete.
Of the four GOP-held House districts Democrats are targeting next year in the state, Fitzpatrick’sseat is by far the safest. That raises the question: How much money and attention are Democrats willing to invest in Pennsylvania?
“Who’s the most vulnerable?” asked Chris Nicholas, a GOP consultant who grew up in Bucks County. The other three — U.S. Rep. Scott Perryand freshmanU.S. Reps. Rob Bresnahan, in the Northeast, and Ryan Mackenzie, in the Lehigh Valley — won by extremely narrow margins last year. “If you’re ranking the four races, you have Rob Bresnahan at the top and Fitzpatrick at the bottom,” Nicholas said.
National Democrats seldom invest as much to try to beat Fitzpatrick as they say they will, Nicholas said. And he pointed to 2018, a huge year for Democrats, when they had a candidate in Scott Wallace who was very well-funded, albeit far less known than Harvie, and still came up short.
Democrats see Harvie as the best shot they have had — a twice-elected commissioner, with name ID from Lower Bucks County, home to many of the district’s swing voters. And the 1st District is one of just three in the country that is held by a Republican member of Congress where Vice President Kamala Harris won last year.
And then there’s Shapiro, who Democrats think will give a boost to candidates like Harvie as he runs for reelection next year. Shapiro won the district by 20 points in 2022.
Following the playbook used by successful candidates this year, Democrats are likely to argue to voters that Fitzpatrick has done little to push back on Trump — while placing cost-of-living concerns at the feet of the Republican Party.
“A lot of people are, you know, upset with where we are as a nation,” Harvie said. “They grew up expecting that if you worked hard and played by the rules, you’d be able to have all the things you needed and have a good life. And that’s not happening for them.”
“The big thing Democrats throw against Republicans is you’re part and parcel of Trump and MAGA, and Fitzpatrick voted against Trump,” Nicholas said.
Over nearly 10 years in Congress, Fitzpatrick has been a rare Republican who pushes back on Trump, though often subtly. Fitzpatrick, who cochairs the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, was the lone Pennsylvania Republican to confirm former President Joe Biden’s electoral victory in 2020. A former FBI agent who spent a stint stationed in Ukraine, he is among the strongest voices of support for Ukraine in Congress, consistently pushing the administration to do more to aid the country as it resists a yearslong Russian invasion.
Fitzpatrick was also one of just two House Republicans to vote against Trump’s signature domestic policy package, which passed in July. He voted for an earlier version that passed the House by just one vote, which Democrats often bring up to claim Fitzpatrick defies his party only when it has no detrimental impact.
“He’s good at principled stances that ultimately do nothing,” said Tim Persico, an adviser with the Harvie campaign. “That is what has allowed him to defy gravity in the previous cycles. … Now the economy is doing badly. … People feel worse about everything, and Fitzpatrick isn’t doing anything to help with that. I think it makes it harder to defy gravity.”
Trump has endorsed every Republican running for reelection in Pennsylvania next year except Fitzpatrick. While the Bucks County lawmaker has avoided direct criticism of the president, in an appearance in Pittsburgh over the summer, Trump characterized the “no” vote on the domestic bill as a betrayal.
Fitzpatrick has faced more conservative primary challengers in the past, but no names have surfaced so far this cycle, a sign that even the more MAGA-aligned may see him as their best chance to hold onto the purple district.
Keeping his distance from Trump, and limiting Democrats’ opportunities to tie the two together, may remain Fitzpatrick’s best path forward.
“Anybody who wants to align themselves with an agenda of chaos and corruption and cruelty ought to be worried,” said Khan, Bucks County’s new district attorney-elect.
This suburban content is produced with support from the Leslie Miller and Richard Worley Foundation and The Lenfest Institute for Journalism. Editorial content is created independently of the project donors. Gifts to support The Inquirer’s high-impact journalism can be made at inquirer.com/donate. A list of Lenfest Institute donors can be found at lenfestinstitute.org/supporters.
A Navy pilot in New Jersey. A democratic socialist in New York City. Three Pennsylvania jurists who never wanted to hit the campaign trail in the first place.
The results were momentous for a party hungry for wins in President Donald Trump’s second term. But they are also likely to revive longstanding debates on how the party should present itself to the American people going into the 2026 midterms and 2028 presidential race.
Should Democrats embrace a bold vision and tack left? Are left-of-center candidates with bipartisan appeal still the way to win statewide races? Or could the party simply embrace the reality of being a big-tent party?
Here are five takeaways from Tuesday’s elections, including the state of play for both parties’ soul-searching exercises.
Democrats gained momentum, but received no clear signs about the future of the party
The energy is clearly there.
Turnout soared on Tuesday, despite being an off-year election, and Democrats won by surprisingly large marginsup and down the ballot.
Even Montgomery County, where there were no competitive elections for county offices, saw its highest-ever off-year turnout at 50.7% of registered voters, and Democrats flipped every contested school board race.
At the top of the ticket, New Jersey’s Mikie Sherrill and Virginia’s Abigail Spanberger, both U.S. representatives with national security backgrounds, ran up the scores in their gubernatorial races while portraying themselves as pragmatists.
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“There’s a new politics,” Krasner said Wednesday. “It’s pretty clear that the American people, Philadelphians, are tired of insiders who promise them things they don’t do. They’re tired of political dynasties.”
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Democratic strategist Brendan McPhillips, who has worked for progressive candidates as well as Joe Biden’s and Kamala Harris’ campaigns in Pennsylvania, said the party should embrace the ideological diversity of its constituencies.
“People have tried to ask this question of who represents the soul of the party, and I just think it’s a bad question,” he said. “The party is a huge tent, and last night proves you can run for Democratic office in New York City and New Jersey and Bucks County and Erie, Pa., and each of those races can look entirely different.”
Democrats made gains with Latino voters
One of the more worrying signs for Democrats in the Trump era has been the president’s increasing popularity among Latino voters.
They flipped that narrative Tuesday.
After 10 months of aggressive U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids under Trump that are seen by many in the Latino community as indiscriminate and cruel, Democrats appear to have undone some of Trump’s gains in what has long been a blue constituency.
In New Jersey, the two counties where Sherrill made the biggest gains compared with Harris in the 2024 presidential election were Passaic and Hudson, both of which are more than 40% Hispanic, according to the U.S. Census.
Sherrill won Hudson by 50 percentage points, which represents a 22-point swing from Harris. And she won Passaic by 15 percentage points after Trump surprisingly carried the county with a 3-point margin in 2024.
In Philadelphia, Krasner won eight wards that the more conservative Patrick Dugan — Krasner’s opponent in both the general election and the Democratic primary — had won in their first round in May.
All were in or near the Lower Northeast, and the biggest swing came in the heavily Latino 7th Ward, which includes parts of Fairhill and Kensington. Krasner’s share of the vote there grew from 46% in the primary to 86% in the general.
It’s really hard to unseat Pennsylvania judges
Only one Pennsylvania Supreme Court justice since 1968 has failed to win a retention election, in which voters face a yes-or-no decision on whether to give incumbents new 10-year terms, rather than a choice between candidates.
Tuesday’s results will be discouraging for anyone hoping to increase that number soon.
Hoping to break liberals’ 5-2 majority on the state’s highest court, Republicans spent big in an attempt to oust three justices who were originally elected as Democrats. Democratic groups then poured in their own money to defend the incumbents.
In his third attempt to become governor, Republican Jack Ciattarelli bet big on South Jersey, the more conservative but less populous part of the Garden State.
It didn’t work.
In his 2021 campaign against Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy, Ciattarelli carried Atlantic, Cape May, Cumberland, Gloucester, and Salem Counties with a combined 56.8% of the vote. Trump then went on to sweep all five counties last year.
But on Tuesday, Ciattarelli performed 8 percentage points worse in the region, giving Sherrill a narrow lead in South Jersey, where she won three of the five counties south of Camden.
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Republicans now face their own soul-searching question: How to win without Trump?
In 2024, Trump’s coattails helped Republicans win control of Congress and other elected offices across the country — including in two Pennsylvania swing districts.
With the president in his second and final term, how will the GOP win without him on the ballot?
For Jim Worthington, the Trump megadonor and owner of the Newtown Athletic Club in Bucks County, Tuesday’s results show that the GOP needs to do more work on the ground if it wants to succeed without the man who has dominated Republican politics since 2015.
Elections, he said, are “not about the policies as much they’re just turnout. Red team, blue team.”
The blue team won Tuesday, he said, because the red team didn’t do enough of the legwork needed to get its voters to cast mail ballots and to drive in-person turnout on Election Day. Worthington said the results left him concerned about Republican Treasurer Stacy Garrity’s chances of unseating Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro next year.
“If we don’t get a robust vote-by-mail, paid-for program, it’s going to be very difficult, very difficult, if not impossible for Stacy Garrity to win,” Worthington said. “During this whole 2025 year when we could have been building this toward 2026, we lost a year because we didn’t do it.”
Staff writer Anna Orso contributed to this article.
This suburban content is produced with support from the Leslie Miller and Richard Worley Foundation and The Lenfest Institute for Journalism. Editorial content is created independently of the project donors. Gifts to support The Inquirer’s high-impact journalism can be made at inquirer.com/donate. A list of Lenfest Institute donors can be found at lenfestinstitute.org/supporters.
Bucks County voters on Tuesday did what protest and legal action could not, halting a controversial sheriff’s office alliance with ICE by electing a Democrat who has pledged to end the partnership.
Sheriff-elect Danny Ceisler said Wednesday that he will issue a moratorium barring deputies’ cooperation with ICE on his first day in office. From there, he said, he will figure out how to disentangle the sheriff’s office from the agreement signed by his predecessor.
Ceisler beat incumbent Republican Fred Harran by more than 10% of the vote in unofficial returns.
Ceisler and a cadre of immigration activists ― who saw an ACLU-led lawsuit falter ― had portrayed the election as the last chance to kill the affiliation, after a Bucks judge ruled last month that it had been legally implemented and could proceed.
Army veteran Danny Ceisler won the hotly contested Bucks County sheriff race Tuesday night.
Harran, who led the Bensalem Police Department before being elected sheriff four years ago, said Wednesday that Ceisler will “have to answer for a person who becomes victimized by an individual that should have been deported. And he’ll have to sleep with that, and it’ll be on his head, not mine.“
His said his plans around the program had been misrepresented.
“Everyone knows my intentions. It was never making car stops on people who were dark-colored. My career speaks for itself in terms of my partnerships with the community.”
He had staunchly defended his decision to assist ICE, insisting it would make residents safer and even potentially bring new funding and police equipment to the county.
Ceisler called immigration the single biggest issue in this election.
“My goal was to provide an alternative which was a no-nonsense, reasonable approach to public safety,” Ceisler said Wednesday, noting that it was now “my responsibility to deliver on that.”
Officials with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement declined to comment.
The partnership, which recently became active after months of planning, provoked backlash, including the lawsuit, public demonstrations outside the courthouse, and a repudiation by the Democratic-led Bucks County Board of Commissioners.
Nationally, only a few police agencies that signed on with ICE have dropped out of those agreements.
Ceisler’s victory was part of a Democratic sweep of county positions in a critical swing county that narrowly voted to elect President Donald Trump last year.
“I am walking on air,” said Laura Rose, a leader of Bucks County Indivisible, which supports immigrants and progressive causes. “Bucks County voters soundly rejected Sheriff Harran and his plan to turn county deputies into de facto ICE agents.”
In the spring, Harran and ICE officials signed what is called a 287(g) agreement, named for a section of a 1996 immigration law. It enables local police to undergo ICE training, then assist the agency in identifying, arresting, and deporting immigrants.
“Ceisler’s victory proves what we’ve always known ― 287(g) agreements don’t make us safer, they divide our community,” said Diana Robinson, co-executive director of Make the Road Pennsylvania, a plaintiff in the lawsuit.
The agreement with ICE “put Bucks County at risk,” and the election showed that “voters reject fear-based policies,” she said Wednesday.
Robinson and other opponents insist that turning local officers into immigration agents breaks community trust with the police and puts municipal taxpayers at risk of paying big legal settlements. ICE officials, however, say the program helps protect American communities, a force-multiplier that adds important staff strength to an agency workforce that numbers about 20,000 nationwide.
The number of participating police agencies has soared under Trump, with ICE having signed 1,135 agreements in 40 states as of Wednesday. Seven states, including New Jersey and Delaware, bar the agreements by law or policy.
The number of new agreements increases almost every day, and Trump has pushed hard for greater local involvement. On his first day in office he directed the Department of Homeland Security to authorize local police to “perform the functions of immigration officers” to “the maximum extent permitted by law.”
Shortly before the government shutdown, ICE was poised to begin backing its recruitment efforts with money, announcing that it would reimburse cooperating police agencies for costs that previously had been borne by local departments and taxpayers.
But activists focused on the difference between what Harran said he intended to do and the much broader powers conferred within the agreement with ICE.
Harran signed up for the “Task Force Model,” the most far-reaching of the three types of 287(g) agreements. It allows local police to challenge people on the streets about their immigration status and arrest them for violations.
Harran said his deputies would not do that. Instead, he said, they would electronically check the immigration status of people who have contact with the sheriff’s office because of alleged criminal offenses. Those found to be in the country illegally would be turned over or transported to ICE, if the federal agency desires, he said.
This suburban content is produced with support from the Leslie Miller and Richard Worley Foundation and The Lenfest Institute for Journalism. Editorial content is created independently of the project donors. Gifts to support The Inquirer’s high-impact journalism can be made at inquirer.com/donate. A list of Lenfest Institute donors can be found at lenfestinstitute.org/supporters.
