HOMER CITY, PA — The vast divide between the government’s understanding of the needs of the people they serve and the people themselves was never more excruciatingly apparent than it was this past week at a Pennsylvania town hall meeting.

The two-hour event, sponsored by the Environmental Protection Agency Interagency Working Group Rapid Response Team, was supposed to be for the IWP to answer questions of local residents, elected officials, small business owners, and furloughed power plant employees about the grants they were promised to revitalize their borough after the closure a year ago of a coal-fired power plant.

But the forum ended up being a 100-minute talk from the IWP panelists about how great the interagency was. This left just twenty minutes for over 70 people to try to get a question in.

Sen. Bob Casey announced the formation of the IWP and its Rapid Response Team last fall with a lot of fanfare, with Department of Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, Gov. Josh Shapiro, and Biden Administration officials in attendance. He said then the response team’s creation was “to support economic revitalization and workforce development for Pennsylvania energy communities.”

In theory, it sounds great. But these are people’s real lives we are talking about — lives uprooted forever because of the power plant’s closure. Alas, the meeting was filled with so much gibberish and very few answers to real-life problems it is difficult to pinpoint where to start, so let’s begin with the simple things like the titles, rapid response and interagency working group.

Despite the title of the Rapid Response Team, most people at this meeting would have assured you that since the team’s inception, nothing has been either rapid or responsive. And experience dictates that if there are multiple agencies from the government “working together,” rest assured they are not, which means nothing is being done.

When the Homer City Power Generating Station was shut down last July, William A. Wexler, the CEO of the private equity group that owned the plant, said at the time the decision to close it was based on factors that included “the low price of natural gas, a dramatic spike in the cost of its ongoing coal supply, unseasonably warm winters, and increasingly stringent environmental regulations.”

For over 40 years giant plumes of steam pouring out of the towering stacks of this 1,800-megawatt plant were a constant in this area. It was a site that could be seen for miles in every direction from its perch in the Laurel Mountains.

The last time the power plant ran at capacity was in 2005, when coal was the dominant source of electricity in this country. Last year, the plant ran only 20% of the time as politics and policies took their toll on the industry. Now there are no great plumes coming from the stacks, the jobs are gone, the jobs that supported the jobs at the plant are gone, and most residents of the tiny borough of 1,800 are all sitting at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania athletic facility listening to government officials talk to them about “deliverables, grants, identifying needs and honoring community voices and desired outcomes.”

The slide show presented by the IWG said their mission was to “ensure no communities are left behind in the energy transition” and their job for the past year has been “to provide coordinated, efficient, responsive, targeted governance.”

They listed as their accomplishments so far as allocating $228 million to energy communities, creating awareness by having 150 stories in the media about the IWG working group, attracting 800 people to enter their portal to ask questions, and sending two reports to President Joe Biden on these accomplishments.

The two-hour event was supposed to be for the community stakeholders to ask questions about all of the grants they’ve applied for (and haven’t received) the monies that were supposed to be used in their now energy-less community to rebuild (no evidence of that), and how to better access this program.

When one small business owner said she had replied for a grant and never heard back, one of the government officials taking the questions told her to apply again. Even University President Michael Driscoll expressed his personal frustration in not being able to unpack just exactly what was being offered to the community.

“It is unclear to me that the federal government has a full plan here,” Driscoll said to the panel. When he received crickets in response, Driscoll emphasized he was someone who was accustomed to navigating complicated issues. “Did I mention that I have a doctorate in electrical engineering and that we need a good plan for addressing aging infrastructure,” he said, clearly exasperated.

His big issue, as both an administrator at the university but also as a resident, was one shared by all of the community members in the room: job opportunities so that their greatest treasure, their people, don’t leave.

Homer City mayor Arlene Wanatosky asked how the borough could utilize the now dormant railroad tracks — once used to bring coal to and from the plant — for transporting commerce to help jumpstart the economy.

No one had an answer for that.

No one seems to have an answer for any of the communities that have lost their power plants over the past six years — but in every borough, town, or township where it has happened, the economic impact has been devastating.

A study done by Ohio University and the University of Maryland showed that if the Dayton Power and Light coal fire power plant closed in Adams County, Ohio, it would not only cost thousands of direct and indirect jobs, but also that those displaced workers transitioning to emerging occupations with similar skill requirements would experience wage decreases and millions would be lost in tax revenue for local governments.

Which is exactly what has happened here.

Lifelong Homer City resident Shawn Steffee, who is business agent and executive board trustee for Boilermakers Local 154, said nothing has happened here from these government groups over the past year. Local 154 workers have been mainly located in western Pennsylvania, but as of late some of its union members now work in counties in Ohio and West Virginia.

Despite all of the promises, town hall meetings, and creations of federal working groups, Steffee said it has been a year of nothing happening for places such as Homer City and for the union men and women who worked there.

“There is nothing being done; it’s a shame hearing rumors, but no action there or anywhere in Pennsylvania, just solar and wind. I hate to say it, but my attention has shifted towards Ohio and West Virginia,” said Steffee.

“They got equity in those states, and they are building and maintaining their fossil fuel infrastructure. Example: Lordstown right now is building a new gas plant and West Virginia will be building a huge gas plant in 2026.”

“First energy will now keep coal fired plants open in West Virginia till 2040 and build transmission lines into Virginia for data centers,” he said.

Virginia is the home of the highest concentration of the country’s data centers, which require an enormous amount of reliable, affordable, sustainable energy to power them. That’s what West Virginia is happy to do through a proposed project that will originate in Morgantown and will rely on coal plants in West Virginia that were meant to be shuttered like Homer City was here in Pennsylvania.

Steffee has a few words for the elected officials in the federal government who led the industry down this path in this state and have failed to do anything since the plant closed, he’d really like them ponder.

 “Somebody better wake up in PA.”

There have been too many stories told across this country of small towns and boroughs who have been hit with economic hardship caused by a decline in a manufacturing or fossil fuel-based industry like steel, or coal mining. They are towns where economic diversity was never considered, and the town dies when the employer or industry dies.

In the moment of the announcement of the closure, or in an election year, politicians will swoop in with big promises send in the troops with bureaucratic paperwork that never delivers. The promises either take so long that the town dies in waiting, or the people give up hope and move on.

By the end of 2028, Pennsylvania’s four remaining major coal plants are expected to close or stop burning coal primarily because of EPA regulations, which means there will be four other boroughs and towns facing the same economic despair as Homer City.

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What Homer City and all of the other cities and towns that will face this in the next four years needs is not a band of government officials to come to their town and discuss deliverables and then not provide them, or promise grants and then fall short in giving them. What they do need is a band of government officials, who if they are indeed sincere in the pledge to help, to move in and understand what the town really needs rather than talking over them.

As one frustrated attendee, a local businesswoman said, “Spend some time with us, walk in our shoes. You’ve all contributed to our entire lives being turned upside down, it is the least you could do.”