The years-long legal battle between a Warren company and an Indiana County township has taken a new turn.

Pennsylvania General Energy, based in Warren, has filed suit in federal district court against Grant Township seeking an injunction that would prohibit the township from enforcing a home rule charter that purports to prohibit PGE’s intention to operate an oil and gas wastewater injection well.

In 2014, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued permits for PGE to convert the well and, in response, Grant Township crafted a “Community Bill of Rights” aimed at prohibiting PGE’s proposed activity as a means of protecting the water supply in their community.

PGE challenged the constitutionality of the ordinance and ultimately settled with Grant Township for $1 dollar while elements of the ordinance were struck down on constitutional grounds.

In 2017, the state Department of Environmental Protection approved the injection well proposal and took the township to court to determine if its local rules would supersede state law. DEP won that case.

That did not stop the township.

According to an order from federal Western District of Pennsylvania Judge Susan Paradise Baxter filed in late March 2019, the township “even after the ordinance was adjudged preempted by state law, Grant Township sought to make an end-run around the judicial determination by amending its form of government and adopting the preempted and constitutionally deficient provisions in the form of a Home Rule Charter.”

The two parties settled a case in the federal Third Circuit Court of Appeals back in 2019. A stipulation in that case stated that “all participated in the Third Circuit’s Mediation program, amicably resolving the claims of all parties and resulting in the withdrawal of all appeals and the discontinuance of all appellate proceedings with prejudice.”

This most recent suit was filed on Dec. 9.

PGE alleges in that filing that DEP issued a permit to use the well as an injection well in March 27 but “rescinded” the permit due to the home rule charter (HRC). They claim they have tried to sell the well but can’t do so because of the conditions in the home rule charter.

The filing raises 11 specific counts — including First Amendment, Fourteenth Amendment as well as due process and equal protection issues and asks for “a preliminary and permanent injunction prohibiting any action to enforce” the home rule charter and an “entry of judgement declaring that the HRC is void and unenforceable in its entirety….”

PGE further argues that they have been “precluded from operating the Yanity Well for legally permissible injection purposes.

“Most recently, in November 2020, Grant Township relied on the HRC in part to order PGE to stop hauling oil and gas well drilling equipment on Township roadways despite the existence of a valid highway permit to do so,” they write. “Grant Township’s conduct in abrogating PGE’s interest in environmental and UIC permits at the Yanity Well is deliberate, arbitrary, and irrational, exceeds the limits of governmental authority, amounts to an abuse of official power, and shocks the conscience.