Wednesday, March 7, 2001
Vanguard
presents vision of Uwchlan campus
LIONVILLE - Ralph Packard, chief financial officer of the Vanguard Group, told the Exton Chamber of Commerce at a luncheon yesterday that his company could start construction on its proposed Uwchlan campus as early as the spring of 2002.
If after one-hundred years have passed, and "The Happy Days
Farm" still exists,
how wise would we be thought of by those who will play upon the green fields.
Sunday July 9, 2000.Westward
expansion happened a very long time ago.
It took from the 1930' till now to create a fragile recovery
in the vast amount of Natural Resource,
that was squandered for that which no longer exists today.
Look East to the Delaware where
enters the SCHUYLKILL RIVER.
There is the place where the future must be built
to the best of our achievements.
TREDYFFRIN - Gov. Ridge is scheduled to travel to the Vanguard Group's corporate
headquarters today to announce a $55 million aid package that would help
Vanguard create as many as 6,000 jobs in Chester County over the next five
years.
The deal includes tax breaks and other state aid that persuaded the mutual fund
company to expand in Chester County.
Vanguard, the nation's second-largest mutual-fund firm, plans to build an office
park on a 245-acre tract near the Downingtown interchange of the Pennsylvania
Turnpike in Uwchlan to accommodate future growth. It will keep its headquarters
in Tredyffrin.
Vanguard considered sites in several other states, including New Jersey and
Delaware, before settling on Chester County, where the company is the largest
employer.
Vanguard is expected to invest about $500 million, and the state incentives will
cover about 10 percent of the cost. In return, the state expects to get about
$40 million a year in income taxes from Vanguard employees.
Wednesday, May 24, 2000
While the celebration goes on about keeping the Vanguard Group in Pennsylvania (
"Vanguard and Ridge are happy with the deal," May 23) and while
elected officials jump through all kinds of financial hoops to ensure that
Vanguard is made to feel like the "golden child," Vanguard has ignored
the pleas from the environmental community. Shouldn't Vanguard, above all, be
the shining example of a good corporate neighbor, in particular, by employing
the best environmental design to its expanding facility?
Or because of its "favorite son" status, is the company exempt from
the environmental laws? The case in point is the lack of stormwater recharge
with the expansion of its site in Tredyffrin Township. This facility is on
Valley Creek, which is designated an "exceptional value" watershed.
Valley Creek is at great risk of being degraded by the lack of stormwater
recharge and by the high volumes of water flooding through this fragile natural
treasure.
The Valley Creek Coalition has met many times with a variety of company
representatives to express the importance and need to incorporate stormwater
infiltration into Vanguard's expansion design. Time and again, these dialogs
have produced no positive results. The Valley Forge National Historical Park,
also a member of the coalition, has separately met and appealed to Vanguard to
be a good corporate neighbor and employ stormwater infiltration into its design.
This is particularly important to the park because it receives all of the
stormwater that is released from the numerous upstream detention basins.
It is time that Vanguard got off its high horse and demonstrated good
environmental stewardship and prove that it is worthy of all the subsidies being
bestowed upon it - subsides made up of taxpayer dollars.
Vanguard, the toast of all this goodwill, should now earn it.
John Hoekstra
Birchrunville
(The author is director of watershed advocacy for Green Valleys Association.)
Wednesday, June 14, 2000
The value of Gov. Ridge's stock holdings:
Spectrum Control Inc. of Erie, $11,500
Viacom, $14,105
Merck & Co., $14,650
Steris Corp. of Ohio, $2,042
Penn Attorneys Title Insurance of Erie, $15,322
Advance Tissue Sciences of California, $2,025
Nike, $1,950
General Electric, $30,720
Walt Disney Co., $4,020
Ikon Office Solutions of Malvern, $3,050
Lucent Technology, $11,820
Pfizer, $9,168
Coca-Cola, $5,340
Cisco Systems, $13,000
Ridge also owns shares in two mutual funds:
Davis Financial Services of Arizona, $16,206
IDS Securities of Minnesota, undisclosed
Ridge sold shares in the following stocks:
Tollgrade Communications
TWA
General Electric
Friday, June 23, 2000
WEST BRADFORD - Against the backdrop of a signature Chester County landscape,
Gov. Ridge signed into law yesterday the state's most ambitious effort to
control sprawl in more than 30 years.
"I truly believe this is one of the most important pieces of legislation
the General Assembly and the Governor's Office have worked together to
create," said Ridge. "These bills will help Pennsylvania grow smarter
in the 21st century."
Later in the day, in Delaware County, Ridge signed a law providing for $25
million in grants to the state's often cash-strapped volunteer fire and
ambulance companies.
At the Chester County site, surrounded by local and state officials, Ridge
praised State Sen. James W. Gerlach (R., Chester) and Rep. David J. Steil (R.,
Bucks) for their tenacity in seeing their landmark growth-management bills
through the legislative gauntlet.
More than 100 people attended the signing ceremony, which was held on the
Albertson-Yerkes farm on the western edge of the village of Marshallton.
By providing strong incentives for municipalities to plan for growth together,
the measures aim reverse the effects of decades of court decisions that forced
municipalities to allow for every conceivable land use within their borders. If
they failed to do so, they were often subject to expensive and lengthy court
battles with developers.
The result has been sprawl spreading across the landscape, eating up prime
farmland, driving up the costs of providing services and strangling economic
growth. In some areas of the state, especially in Southeastern Pennsylvania, the
rate of growth has exceeded an acre an hour.
Besides adding protection from legal challenges, the incentives for
multi-municipal planning include the ability to designate growth areas and
eligibility for priority state funding. They also free municipalities from
having to plan for every type of land use.
And, for the first time, they allow municipalities to transfer development
rights across their boundaries, a concept that encourages growth in areas that
have the infrastructure to support it.
Ridge, who has been hailed nationally as a leader in the anti-sprawl movement,
promised to use the powers of his office to ensure that the wishes of local
governments are adhered to when state agencies are making decisions about
economic development.
He ticked off several agencies, including the Departments of Environmental
Protection, Agriculture, and Economic Development, that will be the leaders in
this effort.
"We will scrub them all up and figure out ways to make their decisions
consistent with the goals of the legislation," Ridge said after his signing
speech.
He signed the bills in a field on a 110-acre farm that was permanently preserved
in 1997 when its development rights were purchased by a developer and
transferred several miles away to another subdivision site in West Bradford
Township.
The two measures, which Ridge and others said were Pennsylvania's answer to
combating sprawl without threatening economic growth, private property rights,
or the prerogatives of local government, passed by wide margins in the
legislature. Both survived last-minute, special-interest amendments designed to
weaken their impact.
In the end, representatives of local government, conservationists, homebuilders
and farmers came together to reach a consensus, clearing the way for the bills
to pass. Gerlach said that without this consensus, success would have been out
of reach.
"It's a very Pennsylvania approach," said Joanne Denworth, president
of 10,000 Friends of Pennsylvania, a key player in the bills' passage. "We
have this tradition in Pennsylvania of local government. This doesn't change
that."
"This is a great day for Pennsylvania," said Steil, who credited the
Governor's Office with tweaking the final language and with "opening a few
doors and closing others" in the final days of the debate.
Ridge said the laws put an end to the arguments that economic growth and
environmental protection cannot coexist. He called the effort to define this
debate as a battle between jobs and the environment "the politics of false
choices."