Data center development seems to be today’s version of this debate, but it keeps coming up until everyone understands the core concepts: Our laws and ordinances are there to protect and preserve our communities. Health, resource, and financial risks should not be dismissed too quickly. Transparency is critical for trust.

If there is a reasonable chance that a new development might hurt the health or well-being of the families that live in the community, then the community deserves to reject or delay that development until the community is satisfied.

There is another problem. Under the Municipalities Planning Code, the maximum fine for a zoning violation is $500 a day. For a family or a small business, that is real money. For a billion-dollar corporation, it is a rounding error. When the penalty for breaking local rules costs less than a company spends on coffee, communities do not have real enforcement power. That has to change.

Western PA is undergoing real economic change, including new industries and businesses like robotics and advanced batteries are making local investments that our kids will be thankful to have. That proximity is an opportunity. It’s our responsibility to make sure we capitalize on it, through education, worker protections and long-term sustainability.

Our kids need exposure to where the economy is headed, our workers need union support, training centers and other pathways to great jobs in promising fields. Only then can our entrepreneurs and business owners proceed into these sectors or supply the goods and services those new industries and workers will need.

Health care in Washington County should not depend on where you live, where you work, or whether Harrisburg and Washington can agree on a budget. But right now, too many families are one bad break away from losing coverage. Next year’s cuts to Medicaid threaten more than 300,000 Pennsylvanians, plus the providers who serve our communities, from home health aides to small practices, who are already operating on reimbursement rates that have not kept up with the cost of doing business.

Raising Pennsylvania's minimum wage is part of the answer. It would lift tens of thousands of workers off Medicaid and save the state hundreds of millions of dollars a year. But it has to be done right. If wages go up and reimbursement rates stay flat, providers get squeezed and the people who depend on their services lose access. Getting wages right and getting reimbursement right are the same problem, and our next representative needs to understand that.

The minimum wage was created to protect workers and support a basic standard of living.

Pennsylvania's minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 for almost 20 years. Raising it is long overdue. There’s a catch though: doing it correctly means addressing the full picture. Healthcare providers, from home health aides to small practices, operate on reimbursement rates set by the state. People who depend on their services are guaranteed to lose their healthcare if we don’t increase reimbursement rates as part of the minimum wage increase plan.

Getting wages right requires the adjustment of reimbursement rates. Fix one without the other and working families will still lose. Don’t let them tell you the minimum wage was never meant to support people though - that’s exactly what it is intended to do.

Every child in Washington County deserves a real shot in life, no matter what their parents do or which school district they live in. Right now, that is not what we have. Some districts can offer career and technical programs, mental health services, and special education support. Others are stretched so thin they are borrowing money just to keep classrooms open.

Pennsylvania is working to fix this. The state has started putting real money into an adequacy formula that sends the most help to the schools that need it the most. But progress has been slow, and small and rural communities are still waiting. Our schools need to be ready to give every student the tools to compete, whether that means college, a trade, or a career in a field that did not exist ten years ago.

Head Start has been part of Washington County for decades. Blueprints runs programs right here, serving children from birth to five with education, health screenings, nutrition, and family support.

The federal government has spent the last year and a half trying to dismantle it. First they proposed eliminating all funding. When that failed, they closed regional offices, froze grants, and forced programs across the country to borrow money just to make payroll. Now they want to strip out the standards that make the program work, from class size limits and curriculum requirements to protections for children with disabilities.

Pennsylvania's legislature acted. A bill passed the House 202 to 1 to protect state early learning funding even if federal Head Start is cut, and the governor signed it this July. It’s the kind of planning ahead that keeps a local program like Blueprints running no matter what happens in Washington.

We are an energy-producing region. The world’s demand for fossil fuels feeds a lot of families around here.

But even the butcher eats vegetables.

The unknown future of the global energy market is a considerable risk to our economy, and climate change is a related risk we can't ignore. The war in Iran proved we should still be very concerned about this risk, affecting the health of the global economy in less than a week. Prices spiked, family budgets got rewritten. It’s no fluke. As a region, we must not treat renewables, electrification and battery technologies as threats. We must instead entice these industries and opportunities to come here and build in harmony with our existing employers.

Battery manufacturers have made major investments in nearby regions, but we haven't pursued them as aggressively as others. Geothermal uses many of the same skills our energy crews already have. Rather than betting everything on a small segment of the energy industry, we must act with the confidence that we can be leaders across the board.

Pennsylvania is one of eleven states that sets no limit on what one person or political committee can give a candidate. This is why we've seen billionaires meddling in our affairs in recent years.

Corporate money makes it worse. Corporations doing business in Pennsylvania are currently free to spend without limit to influence our elections. Meanwhile, the state of Hawaii has passed a law to address this issue. Their law is based on the fact that corporations have legal definitions in the law. Hawaii changed the legal definition of a corporation, expressly stating that corporations have no right to political spending.

Will this work? It's too early to tell. Is it popular? Definitely. Voters in Maine approved a Super PAC cap of $5000, 75% to 25% before a court struck that approach down. Pennsylvania, like Hawaii, can choose to address this critical issue.

Rebecca has already begun discussing the issue with voters, and will invite input from legal scholars, elected officials and labor leaders. Maybe it will look like Hawaii, changing the Pennsylvania definition of a corporation. Maybe you'll tell her you want something different. But we cannot allow our system to be twisted by money any longer.