An LNG plant could bring millions to bankrupt Chester. Leaders and residents are saying no thanks.

What officially was a public hearing mutated at times into a boisterous and emotional demonstration against a multi-billion-dollar concept, a potential excavator to help a bankrupt city dig its way out of financial peril.

In five years, if it comes to fruition, a liquefied natural gas facility will have created thousands of jobs and generated more than $700 million in tax revenue for the host city, county, and state, according to an analysis by the Pennsylvania Manufacturers Association.

Unstated was the fact that the bankrupt City of Chester would be an ideal site. Once an international shipbuilding power, it has a port with easy access to the ocean. And could it ever use the money.

Yet the sign-hoisting Chester residents among the standing-room-only crowd at the hearing at Widener University on Tuesday, convened by the state-appointed Philadelphia LNG task force, emphatically said no, thank you.

The reaction was “understandable,” Carl A. Marrara, the manufacturers association’s executive director, said after he testified. But he argued that making the gas in this area would be a far better alternative than importing it from Russia.

Task force member Toby Rice, head of EQT Corp., a Pittsburgh company that is one of the country’s largest gas producers, said that the protesters were so focused on the environmental and safety issues that they were ignoring the economic “opportunity.”

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Michael T. Doweary, the state receiver who nine months ago took the city into what has become a contentious and often ugly bankruptcy proceeding, and Stefan Roots, who is expected to become mayor in January because he is running unopposed in the general election, are siding with the protesters. For Chester, they suggested, the prospective plant may well be fool’s gold.

It’s not about the money, they say, nor is it exclusively about hazards and pollution, which have been focal points of LNG protests around the country. They hold that it’s very much about the future of Chester’s economy and what kind of a city it will be when it emerges from bankruptcy, whenever that might be.

Said longtime activist Zulene Mayfield, after her testimony had elicited the loudest cheers at the hearing, “It would be like another nail in the coffin.”

No proposed site has been identified officially, but as The Inquirer has reported, a New York firm, Penn LNG, headed by a Philadelphia native, has wanted to build an export terminal along the waterfront in Chester or a neighboring area to exploit the state’s bounty of shale gas and escalating worldwide demand.

Chester Mayor Thaddeus Kirkland, whom Roots defeated in the May primary, said in an interview Tuesday that he had concerns and had not yet made up his mind about the plant. He reiterated that position the next day at a city council meeting.

He said that safety is an issue, and that an undetermined number of residents in riverfront neighborhoods would have to be displaced to make way for a buffer zone.

But Kirkland, who has had a deteriorating relationship with the receiver’s office, has met several times with company officials and said last year that the plant would “probably put us in a great financial position for decades to come.”

He said at last week’s council meeting that he never said he supported such a plant in Chester, but that he had “a right and a duty to listen” to anyone offering ideas that might ultimately benefit the city.

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What is believed to be the targeted Chester site currently houses a 60-acre warehouse property and formerly was occupied by a Ford Motor Co. plant in the city’s industrial heyday. It’s about a half-mile north of the Commodore Barry Bridge.

The plant presumably would be similar to those constructed along the Gulf Coast as the nation has become a natural-gas exporter. Massive refrigeration units cool natural gas sufficiently to liquify it. It then is stored and shipped in insulated tanks and reheated into vapor form. The nearest large-scale LNG plant, in Cove Point, Md., on the west bank of the Chesapeake Bay, has been the target of protests.

LNG proponents say it is gentler on the environment than traditional fossil fuels. On its site, Penn LNG said it planned to build a “state-of-the-art near-zero-emissions facility.” But environmentalists contend that all the processing and shipping represent a major source of pollution and greenhouse gases. They also say that potential explosions present eminent danger to residents.

While such explosions appear to have happened rarely, last year one occurred at an LNG plant in Freeport, La.; no injuries or deaths were reported.

The receiver’s office holds that the facility also would be hazardous to Chester’s economy.

Neither Doweary nor his chief of staff, Vijay Kapoor, testified at last week’s hearing, but they shared their views shortly afterward in a presentation at the semimonthly bankruptcy advisory committee meeting.

Without specifically identifying the LNG prospects, they said in the presentation that “oftentimes, financially struggling communities accept any new revenues they can get,” including from “industries with negative impacts on resident health.”

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The presentation said the city was in danger of becoming “financially dependent on these industries … for decades to come.”

Chester hosts what is believed to be the nation’s largest incinerator — Covanta’s Delaware Valley Resource Recovery Facility — which is near the Delcora wastewater treatment plant.

Mayfield, who owns a home across the street from the incinerator, said that Chester residents, 72% of whom are Black, are victims of environmental racism. She noted that all 10 of the task force members at Tuesday’s hearing are white.

At the bankruptcy meeting, the receiver’s office noted that nearly half the people in the neighborhoods in the vicinity of the riverfront plants live in poverty.

While the manufacturers association estimates that more than 17,000 construction jobs would be created over a four-year period, Kapoor and Roots said it was unclear how much revenue actually would stay in Chester.

After the plant was built, the association says, 516 would be working there full time. Based on Chester’s tax rate, that could mean about $2 million more annually to the $16 million or so it collects in wage taxes. Other variables would include the value assigned to the facility by a county assessor, and whatever host fees were negotiated.

The loss of manufacturing plants decades ago seriously depleted the city’s tax base. Currently, the slot machines at Harrah’s Philadelphia and the Covanta plant account for about 25% of the city’s $64 million budget.

Through the years, any number of ambitious riverfront projects have been proposed without much to show for them. But the waterfront is “often touted as an economic development opportunity,” the receiver’s office said in its presentation.

Mayfield, founder of Chester Residents Concerned for Quality Living, which helped organize the protests at the LNG hearing, remains active in the city. She holds that an LNG plant would be about the last thing Chester needs.

“Give us a chance to save our community,” she said.