SALENA ZITO: Western Pennsylvania’s lessons: Run on real issues, not for Green fantasies.

“When I was knocking on doors people told me, ‘We want our roads taken care of. We want our public schools funded.’ And they were sick and tired of hearing national messages. We want the way it’s supposed to be from the bottom up, and that will be our message forever,” he said.

Kelly is in the catbird seat as the president of the labor council in one of the best economies he said the region has seen since the heady days of the steel industry. “That is largely on the backs of the energy industry and construction,” he said.
Last week the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry issued a report showing the Pittsburgh jobless rate hit 3.6%, the lowest since the beginning of the ’70s when steel was king and Terry Bradshaw was the starting quarterback for the Pittsburgh Steelers.

Nearly half of them were in construction and you don’t have to look any further than the massive ethane cracker plant under construction in nearby Monaca to tell the story of the remarkable transformation this area has undergone for union families.

“Five years ago Monaca was a snapshot of everything Western Pennsylvania had lost,” he said of the Beaver County borough that was once the home of manufacturers who produced everything from iron, steel wire, glass, tile, and tubing.

“We lost our industry — not just part of it, we literally lost everything. And when you lose your main base of employment, you lose your main base of taxes, which funds our public schools, our roads, our waterways, our ability to invest in our infrastructure. That goes with everything, your health department, everything that comes of that nature,” he said.

Today it is a bustling construction site filled with scores of massive towering cranes, thanks to Shell’s decision to build a multimillion ethane cracker plant there, a construction project that is estimated to employ more than 10,000 over the next 10 years, with talks of an additional ethane hub to be located nearby as well.

“Now you look at it and it is breeding life. It is breeding a new generation of people that get to stay and live and bring up their families in Western Pennsylvania,” he said with pride.

But if the national Democrats pick a candidate who deeply supports the Green New Deal, Kelly said all of the hard work they have done locally to flip the red region to blue won’t matter.

Stay tuned.