Officials come together to plan region’s ‘Next 75’ years
Seventy-five years after Pittsburgh launched its fabled renaissance, elected officials, economic development overseers and corporate leaders gathered in Southpointe to begin crafting a vision for the next 75.
Discerning the future is never easy, especially in this high-tech, high-speed world, but the proactive group of about 60 discussed and cobbled together reasonable proposals and counter proposals Monday afternoon.
The best part: they worked together the way the 10 counties in the Pittsburgh region should.
“To make this work, we have to have all 10 counties in,” said Washington County Commissioner Harlan Shober during the Our Next 75 event, conducted at Noah’s Event Venue in Town Center
Allegheny Conference on Community Development has organized an initiative called Our Next 75, featuring regional visioning workshops involving officials from those counties. This first one Monday shined the spotlight on Washington, Greene and Fayette.
The second will be conducted today for Westmoreland, Indiana and Armstrong, the third May 22 for Butler, Beaver and Lawrence counties.
That last workshop will be followed by what Allegheny Conference officials are planning to be a big event – Our Next75 Summit – June 27 at the Wyndham Grand Hotel in Pittsburgh – in the 10th county, Allegheny.
Jeff Broadhurst, chief executive officer of Eat ‘n Park, and Toni Murphy, a vice president at Comcast, were co-chairs of the breezy, thought-provoking session that lasted little more than an hour.
“Think 10 to 15 years in the future,” Murphy said. “What’s the next big thing? We want all 10 counties to prosper, but not lose their quality of life.”
She and Broadhurst also served as test proctors of sorts.
Each table served as a team, with every member listing on paper what they believed was the biggest challenge facing the region; passing the sheet to the person to the right to come up with a resolution; and doing the same two more times, to answer “Why it won’t work” and “How to Overcome Obstacles.”
Among the priorities discussed for the future were attracting and retaining diverse talent, infrastructure improvements and upgrades, integrating personal life skills into school curriculum and figuring out paths for economic success in under served communities.
The rapidly advancing world of robotics, of course, was a focal point. It has led, and will continue to lead, to human job loss.
“Every job with repeatable action means you’re not going to have a person working,” said Aaron Smith, an attorney with Peacock Keller law firm in Washington. “Robots will be fixing robots.”
Tammy Hardy, of Hardy Enterprises in Waterdam Plaza, Peter Township said “routine and repeatable” could be things of the past.
“We have to find ways for workers to be creative and innovative,” she said.
All three Washington County commissioners were on hand, as were two of three from Greene. Dave Coder had to leave on a personal matter. No Fayette commissioners attended.
Greene Commissioners Blair Zimmerman and Archie Trader were a bit skeptical of how their county may fare in what is supposed to be a cooperative environment.
“We get nothing. We’re a small county,” Trader said.
“I say we’re the county below Washington and not in West Virginia,” Zimmerman said. “We’re a 10-county group, but everyone takes care of their own county. We’re frustrated by the federal and state government. Building in Pennsylvania is tough.
“I vent all the time and it falls on deaf ears.”
He admitted Greene does not have high-profile attractions that Washington has, like Southpointe and The Meadows Racetrack & Casino, but has positive attributes: low taxes, a safe environment, growth because of natural gas processing and an increase in tourism. And he said coal has stabilized.
Zimmerman expressed cautious optimism, but echoed the sentiment of Shober, sitting to his right.
“It’s going to take this whole region to make things happen,” Zimmerman said.