Kathy Dahlkemper for Congress

By George Nelson
HERMITAGE, Pa. -- Work force development was the top concern shared among participants at an economic roundtable convened Monday by U.S. Rep. Kathy Dahlkemper.

More than a dozen Mercer County business, political and education leaders attended the meeting. Dahlkemper, D-3 Pa, is serving the second year of her first term in Congress. She remarked that many contemporaries of her five children -- who range in age from 20 to 30 -- ask what's being done to help ensure they have the opportunity to stay in the area and use the skills and education they have acquired.

"I am talking to more and more businesses ready to start hiring," she said, but many report they can't find the work force they need. "Some people didn't go back and get the training they should have gotten."

While there are companies that praise the local work force, others complain that they can’t get people to show up for work, said Jill Newcomer, project manager for Penn-Northwest Development Corp. Other concerns are the lack of necessary skills and even passing drug tests.

Oftentimes young people aren't aware of opportunities in manufacturing, the congresswoman was told. Bradley Gosser, vice president and executive director of Greenville-Reynolds Development Corp., pointed out that one of the programs at the local career center only has eight students registered for a total available 35 slots during the upcoming year.

Manufacturing has a public relations problem, Dahlkemper said. "People think manufacturing is dying so why should they tell their child to go into manufacturing if it is dying," she remarked. "Yet I think it is alive and well and changing and becoming more dynamic."

Sam Giannetti, executive director of West Central Job Partnership, said his agency is running advertisements in movie theaters and other venues to get the message out that manufacturing isn't dying but is in a "transformative stage." The agency also is working on using the WorkKeys program, which assesses workers' skills and helps link them to employers and training to improve their skills.

Having served on a school board, Gosser said schools often place too much emphasis on all students going to college, when not everyone is suited for that and not all positions require a four- or even a two-year degree. "It seems to me that needs fine-tuned a little bit," he said.

The No Child Left Behind law has "a lot of problems," Dahlkemper said. Not everyone is meant to pursue a four-year degree. Additionally, because the tests associated with the law emphasize math and reading, those skills are often emphasized so students are not engaged early on in areas such as science. "By the time they get to high school they're scared of science," she said.

China, Dahlkemper pointed out, graduates 10 times as many engineers as the United States does, and India four times. "It's pretty frightening," she remarked. Rather than going into science or medicine, a lot of young people are pursuing careers to make money on Wall Street.

No Child Left Behind also has had an impact on the college level, said Roberta Leonard, president of the Greenville Area Chamber of Commerce and director of corporate and foundation support at Thiel College. Students no longer have skills in performing word problems, "which are really what you do in life," she said. In addition, students aren't prepared to read college textbooks, which are written at an 11th grade level.

When someone sees how their education "is going to personally benefit them in some kind of contextual learning situation," advancement is "uncanny," Giannetti said. "The desire to learn just moves up."

Dahlkemper emphasized during the roundtable that a more regional approach needed to be taken in economic development. Many individuals, including those participating in the forum, are involved in working on economic development, "but I think sometimes the boundaries that we are involved in" whether township, city, county or state -- "sometimes keep us from looking at maybe a larger vision," she said. "I see this as very much a regional issue."

Among the initiatives she pointed to was the inland port project being pursued in Erie by Erie County Economic Development Corp. in collaboration with Conneaut Harbor in Ohio, which would impact counties through the Pittsburgh area "because of the amount of material that could come in through that Nova Scotia port of entry," she said. "Think of that kind of volume coming in through Canada through Nova Scotia and having to get down to the population centers of the United States. We are right in the middle," she said. "It’s a great opportunity."

One potential opportunity for Mercer County companies is natural gas exploration in the Marcellus Shale region, which includes parts of Pennsylvania. However, the shale is "not quite beneath us," Penn-Northwest's Newcomer said, and some extraction companies believe they need transportation providers or suppliers need to be right next to their particular well. "Some of it is educating some of the drillers," she said.

The need for energy is going to continue to increase but the recent disaster involving British Petroleum's offshore oil rig and the Massey energy mine collapse in West Virginia illustrate the "inherent risks" in fossil fuels, Dahlkemper said. Energy is also a national security issue, since "we get a lot of our oil from countries that don't like us," she added.

One of the problems in the country with regard to development is that the majority of highway interchanges don’t have the infrastructure to support such development, said Daniel Gracenin, executive director of Mercer County Regional Planning Commission. When companies do show interest, "They want to be there tomorrow," he said. "We try to be proactive," he added, but it is difficult to spend dollars when limited resources are available.

Currency manipulation "needs some attention" and "is going to become a big issue," said Mercer County Commissioner Kenneth Ammann. "We are the only country that doesn’t engage in currency manipulation," he said.

Following the meeting, Dahlkemper noted that shortly after taking office last year she got involved in the Tech Belt corridor being pursued by her fellow U.S. Reps. Tim Ryan, D-17 Ohio, and Jason Altmire, D-Pa. 4, running from Cleveland to Pittsburgh. "For too long we've let our artificial boundaries that we've made … dictate our reach," she said. "If the region is strong we’ll all be strong."