EDITORIAL: Federal effort to help coalfield communities excludes anthracite region
KAYLEE LINDENMUTH / SHENANDOAH SENTINEL - A mining operation is seen from a distance in Mahanoy Township, near Delano.
WASHINGTON, District of Columbia – Struggling Anthracite region communities like Shenandoah won’t be getting a helping hand from a federal government task force designed to help those exact communities.
The White House Interagency Working Group on Coal and Power Plant Communities and Economic Revitalization released their “Initial Report to the President on Empowering Workers Through Revitalizing Energy Communities.”
The report “identified 25 priority geographies hard-hit by declines in coal production and consumption,” and only one such region was in the Commonwealth — the “Western Pennsylvania non-metropolitan area.” An asterisk denoted that it only cracked the Top 25 for “geographic diversity.”
Instead, the focus is on West Virginia and eastern Kentucky, as has been the norm for national conversations on coal mining for the last several decades. Four of the top six are in West Virginia or Kentucky, the two outliers being #5 Alaska and #4 Southwest Virginia.
In fact, a map in the report ranks the top 75 “fossil energy-centric corridors with a high number of fossil energy (FE) activities and jobs” completely excludes the Anthracite coalfields.
The report indicates that nearly $38 Billion is potentially available to “provide immediate investments in Energy Communities.”
Those investments could be grant funds for infrastructure projects, like roads, broadband, water and sewer system improvements, and local transportation, or via resources to “deploy innovated low-carbon technologies on power plants and industrial facilities.
The funds could also be used for abandoned mine land remediation or for regional economic development-aligned workforce development.
Within the next year, the Interagency Working Group plans to align its work with other federal efforts “to direct investment to disadvantaged and environmental justice communities,” launch a series of town hall meetings, and to “establish and expand efforts to create a ‘one-stop shop’ for Energy Communities seeking federal resources and identify mechanisms to coordinate the activities of federal agencies and the delivery of federal resources to reinforce the economic revitalization goals of the Interagency Working Group.”
“United States coal mining employment declined from more than 175,000 in 1985 to roughly 40,000 in 2020,” the report states.
According to a 2001 article in Pennsylvania Heritage magazine, posted to the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, as many people were employed in Pennsylvania’s mines, 180,000, at Anthracite’s peak in the 1910s.
At the 1910 census, Shenandoah was home to 25,774 people, its peak, and the highest population a Schuylkill County municipality has ever seen. The Greater Shenandoah Area was home to nearly a dozen mines at that time.
One-by-one, they closed as demand for “hard coal” declined. Shenandoah’s population declined too, once growing at percentage rates no less than 25%, now declining at similar rates.
By 1970, Shenandoah’s population was below 10,000 for only the second census count in its history. The most recent population estimates show Shenandoah’s population as below 5,000.
Shenandoah, like many others in the region, never fully recovered economically.
Blighted buildings dot the borough, which financially scrapes by year-to-year and often cannot take swift and decisive action on such problems. Roadways, some last paved in the 1970s, are in need of repair and crumble faster than the borough can fix, with funding typically handling two-to-four blocks per year.
Last year, one of the three banks at the principal intersection in town closed, and another is set to close this summer, leaving half of Main and Centre’s corners vacant.
Abandoned mine reclamation is sorely needed in the Greater Shenandoah Area as well. Proven hazards, which have led to loss-of-life, in the Greater Shenandoah Area and throughout northern Schuylkill County, need to be remediated, though federal funds designated for such purposes, distributed through the PA Department of Environmental Protection, are often spent elsewhere.
Shenandoah and the Anthracite region fueled the nation’s industrial revolution and made great sacrifices for the good of the nation in the mine, on the battlefield, and more.
Despite that, our region’s needs are often overlooked on the state and national stages.
If the “Initial Report to the President on Empowering Workers Through Revitalizing Energy Communities” is any indication, there is, sadly, no end in sight to that trend.
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