The Money Came Back. The Paycheck Didn’t.

A lot of money is finally flowing into Appalachian Pennsylvania. Is it flowing through to the people who live there?

Start with what’s true and good, because it’s true and good.

In February, Kongsberg Defence and Aerospace cut a ribbon on Industrial Park Road in Richland Township. Ten million dollars. A new production floor. A line for the Marine Corps ACV-30 turret. The company has been in Johnstown since 2008 and employs more than 220 people here. It is Kongsberg’s largest production facility anywhere outside Norway. In December the Marine Corps handed them a contract worth up to $330 million for thirty-millimeter remote turrets.

In June, JWF Industries cut a ribbon in Windber. A repurposed plant. Two hundred thousand square feet of manufacturing space reorganized and freed up. Bill Polacek stood in front of the crowd and announced the company anticipates more than $500 million in additional contracts and long-term agreements. BAE, Kongsberg, Flyer Defense and Mack Defense were in the room.

That is not a brochure. Those are armored vehicles and weapons stations, built by people who live here, in buildings that used to be something else.

The state is spending, too. Pennsylvania sits on 399,669 acres of abandoned coal mine land, the largest inventory in the country, with roughly five billion dollars in remaining reclamation and stream restoration need. More than 162,000 acres have been rehabilitated so far. This region has never had a shortage of holes in the ground. For once the money is moving toward filling them.

So.

The scoreboard

On September 3rd, the Bureau of Labor Statistics published county wage figures for the first quarter of this year. Here is the district, average weekly wage:

• Juniata: $928
• Bedford: $987
• Cambria: $1,002
• Huntingdon: $1,017
• Somerset: $1,040
• Mifflin: $1,062
• Fulton: $1,063
• Blair: $1,082
• Adams: $1,098
• Franklin: $1,154
• Cumberland: $1,336
• Perry: $842

Pennsylvania: $1,550. The United States: $1,654.

Perry County has the lowest average weekly wage in the Commonwealth. Perry County is in the 13th District.

Every county this district touches is below the state average. Not one exception. Cambria is five hundred and forty-eight dollars a week behind Pennsylvania. That’s better than twenty-eight thousand dollars a year, per worker, against the state’s own middle.

A ribbon-cutting is a photograph. A paycheck is a scoreboard. The photographs are getting better. The scoreboard has not moved.

What Washington did while the ribbons were being cut

On January 8th, the House voted on a three-year extension of the enhanced premium tax credits that let working people afford a health plan they buy themselves. Roll Call 11. It passed, 230 to 196, over the objection of leadership, because seventeen Republicans crossed and voted for it.

Three of them were Pennsylvanians. Bresnahan. Fitzpatrick. Mackenzie.

Congressman John Joyce voted no.

Read that roll call carefully, because there are two Joyces in that chamber. The one from Ohio voted yes. The one from Blair County voted no.

Here is what a no vote bought. When those credits lapsed on January 1st, monthly premiums for Pennie enrollees rose an average of 102 percent. As of August 10th, 191,000 Pennsylvanians had canceled their coverage. Pennie’s own data show older and rural residents dropped out at the highest rates, and Fulton County was among the five counties in the entire Commonwealth with the highest termination rate.

Fulton is in the 13th.

For next year, insurers have asked for another 17 percent on average across the individual market. One carrier asked for roughly 40. Open enrollment starts October 15th. A retired woman in this state is looking at a plan she already can’t afford going up another two-fifths, and the man who represents her is a physician.

There’s more coming. On January 1st, adults nineteen to sixty-four without a child under fourteen must document eighty hours a month of work, school or volunteering to keep Medical Assistance, and renew every six months instead of once a year. Roughly 750,000 Pennsylvanians are on expansion Medicaid. The Department of Human Services says six thousand county assistance office workers need retraining and about two hundred fifty new people need hiring to process it.

Congress passed that requirement without sending a dollar to administer it. The county assistance offices in Ebensburg and Hollidaysburg and Somerset are the ones who get to explain it at the window.

The other bill on the table

Ask anybody around here why a factory would come to Cambria County, and eventually somebody says cheap power.

That advantage is being auctioned away. PJM’s capacity auction for 2027-28 cleared at the cap, $333.44 per megawatt-day, and for the first time failed to secure the generation it says it needs. Three years ago that number was $28.92. The pressure is coming from data center demand, and the cost gets recovered from everybody on the grid, which is to say from a household in Windber and from a metal shop in Johnstown alike.

At the State of the Commonwealth address at Pitt-Johnstown last week, the officials on stage talked about data centers, water and electricity rates. They are right to. When the price cap comes off after 2027-28, the estimates get considerably worse.

Cheap Appalachian electricity used to be this region’s dowry. If it’s bid away to server farms in somebody else’s county, what exactly is left to sell?

So?

The investment is real. The turrets are real. The mine money is real. Nobody should sneer at any of it, and this paper won’t.

But the question isn’t whether money is arriving. It’s whether it lands in a household.

Five hundred million dollars in anticipated contracts is a number on a stage. A thousand and two dollars a week is a number on a stub. Between the two sits everything that actually determines whether a young welder stays in Johnstown or takes the job in Ohio: what the wage is, what the premium costs, whether there’s a daycare slot that matches second shift, what the electric bill runs in February.

The congressman for this district had one clean chance this year to hold down the biggest single household cost in it. He voted against it. Three of his own Pennsylvania colleagues didn’t.

There is no town hall on the calendar in Cambria County to ask him about it.

Where’s the town hall?

Twelve counties, every day, no appointment necessary. — Silas Corvin