Schuylkill County Joins FTZ 147, Opening the Door for New Trade Zone Sites

FTZ News: Schuylkill County is on Foreign-Trade Zone 147’s map. A plant in Pottsville can now ask for designation. The county itself is not a zone.

The paper trail is Board Order 2186, dated Sept. 4 and signed by Christopher Abbott in his capacity as Alternate Chairman of the Foreign-Trade Zones Board, printed in the Sept. 15 Federal Register (2026-18795). The grantee is the FTZ Corp of Southern Pennsylvania. The file is B-42-2025, docketed Sept. 4, 2025, noticed at 90 FR 43168 and corrected three days later. The application described Schuylkill County as adjacent to the Harrisburg port of entry. That description is the legal hook the Board accepted.

Zone 147 opened June 28, 1988, as Board Order 378, at Reading Municipal Airport. It went onto the alternative site framework in 2013 and picked up five more counties in 2015. Until this month the service area was Adams, Berks, Cumberland, Dauphin, Franklin, Fulton, Juniata, Lancaster, Lebanon, Perry and York. Schuylkill is the twelfth.

ASF is the spare key, not a master lock. Inside the published counties the grantee can pin a usage-driven site when a company wants one. Customs still has to activate the acres. The Board kept the usual 2,000-acre lid. OFIS already lists about 341 acres live in the zone. Harley-Davidson, New Era Cap, DHL Supply Chain and a handful of others are on that roster. None of them is in Schuylkill.

On Aug. 4, 2025, the Pottsville Republican Herald quoted Mike Hammer, general manager at Hydro-Extrusions North America, on faster port turns and deferred duty if the county got in. Aaron Gantz of the Greater Reading Chamber Alliance told the same paper the geography made sense. Those were local pitches while the file sat in Washington. The order that came back does not name Hydro-Extrusions or any other Schuylkill operator.

What a treasurer in Frackville gets this week is a path. File with the Reading grantee, wait on designation, wait on CBP. Duty deferral starts after that, not when the county line moved./.


photo by: thetimes-tribune.com