Bruce Toll reopens big PA coal mine

Lehigh Coal & Navigation Co., which started digging hard anthracite coal and building railroads in Schuylkill County in the early 1800s, and for generations supplied the former Bethlehem Steel Co.'s vast Lehigh Valley mills from its underground mills, is poised to expand strip-mining operations at the 8,000-acre site, which sprawls across Tamaqua, Coaldale and neighboring communities, new owner Bruce E. Toll tells me.

Toll's firm, BET Investments, bought the property for $11 million, a fraction of its potential value, according to Toll, after foreclosing on a loan to previous mine operators in June. (Toll is one of the homebuilding Toll Brothers; he also controls the Reedman Toll auto group, and is a former chairman of Philadelphia Media Holdings, which owned the Inquirer and philly.com from 2006 until it lost control in another bankruptcy proceeding earlier this year.) 

Toll says his partner (relationship corrected), veteran New York investment manager Doug Topkis, is hiring a management team with "longterm coal experience." He expects management and sales contracts to be signed "right after Labor Day. There will be an expansion of the mine, and we will be entering into some contracts for coal very soon," with buyers in both Europe and also new markets in Asia. (How'd he find Asian markets? "They called me.")

BET has moved the firm's headquarters to Tamaqua from  its longtime headquarters in Pottsville, the hillside Schuylkill County seat (and home of Yuengling beer, among other surviving factories from its once-thriving industrial center). How will Toll succeed where earlier hard-coal managers have failed? "Better management," he told me. "I have high hopes for this." He's looking at buying other mines, Toll added.

J. Scott Victor and Terry Kohler from SSG Capital Advisors LLC, West Conshohocken, arranged the sale. Philadelphia lawyers Lawrence McMichael and Jennifer Maleski of Dilworth Paxson represented Lehigh Coal, and Jeff Kurtzman from Klehr Harrison advised Toll.