Strong Communities

The things that determine whether a place works are mostly ordinary: whether an ambulance arrives quickly, whether a child can walk to school safely, whether a business district gives people a reason to be there on a Saturday. These are not quality-of-life extras layered on top of local government. They are most of what local government does.

Emergency services are running out of runway

I serve as a volunteer firefighter and EMT, which has given me a view of this problem that a spreadsheet cannot provide.

The traditional model, in which each community fields its own volunteer company staffed from its own residents, is failing quietly across Pennsylvania. Volunteer rosters have thinned for a generation. Call volumes have not. The result is departments that look intact on an org chart and are increasingly fragile at three in the morning on a Tuesday.

Preserving the volunteer tradition and modernizing the delivery model are not in conflict, but pretending the current structure is sustainable does no favors to the people still showing up. The practical path runs through shared training, joint purchasing, serious mutual aid planning, and, where the numbers demand it, regional service models. Allegheny County’s shared 911 center is proof that regional infrastructure can work here. The harder step is bringing that same coordination to fire and EMS delivery.

Streets are a design choice

For seventy years we designed streets primarily to move vehicles, and we got exactly what we designed for. Reversing that is not about ideology. It is about recognizing that every resurfacing, every intersection rebuild, and every sidewalk replacement is a decision about who the street is for, and that making those decisions deliberately costs almost nothing extra.

As Commissioner and liaison to Mt. Lebanon’s Mobility Board, I have worked on the practical version of this: a traffic calming policy that responds to residents, high-visibility crosswalks near schools and parks, sidewalk investment prioritized where people actually walk, and a complete streets approach that treats every project as an opportunity rather than a maintenance obligation.

There is also a regulatory gap worth naming. Mobility technology has moved faster than the law governing it. Pennsylvania still classifies devices by category when it should be regulating by mass, speed, and operating capability. The e-bike question is the visible edge of a much broader problem.

Place sets the platform

Every institution inherits a place, and the shape of that place sets the conditions under which everything else has to be managed. Spatial form drives tax-base productivity, the value a community generates per acre and per foot of infrastructure it has to maintain. That in turn drives the service and infrastructure burden: lane miles, pipe, terrain, travel time, replacement schedules. Together those determine how much room the institution has left to govern with.

Two terms are useful here, and they are analytical rather than ideological. Growth is productive when it uses existing infrastructure efficiently, raises value per acre or per service mile, and strengthens recurring revenue faster than recurring obligations. It is consumptive when it expands the physical footprint faster than the value base, requires new roads, pipe, frontage, and fleet travel, and creates replacement obligations that arrive later and at larger scale. Consumptive growth usually looks positive on the day it is approved. Its cost shows up in a budget nobody at the table will still be responsible for.

That is a test to apply to a pattern over time, not a label to hang on a neighborhood or a project without the analysis to support it.

It also needs a qualification I take seriously. The objective is not maximum density or maximum value per acre at any cost. A strong place balances fiscal durability, livability, accessibility, and resilience. The most durable communities are not simply the most productive ones. They are the ones where value, serviceability, and everyday human quality reinforce each other.

Opportunity is a local outcome

Economic vitality is built at street level: viable business districts, housing people can actually get into, workforce pathways that connect to real employers, and infrastructure that supports growth rather than constraining it.

Public education is the largest single lever in that system, and Pennsylvania’s school funding structure remains one of the most inequitable in the country. Where a child lives should not determine the quality of their education to the degree that it currently does. That is a state-level design failure with entirely local consequences.