Casey: $18.4M awarded for revitalization in Pa. coal communities; $0 coming here

SHENANDOAH – A U.S. Senator announced a hefty grant award he says is to support workforce development and community revitalization in Pennsylvania coal communities, though not a penny is coming to the heart of the anthracite.

Senator Bob Casey announced the funding awards Thursday for 21 projects. Only three are in the anthracite coalfields and none are in Schuylkill County.

The nearest project funded is the Broadcast Arts Initiative at the Shamokin-based Screen Arts Institute. That project has received $400,000 and is the only project funded within an hour’s drive from Shenandoah.

Though, Casey says he “won’t stop fighting to ensure our Appalachian communities are not left behind.”

The other two projects east of the Susquehanna included a $50,000 grant to Scranton-based Johnson College and a $1.3 Million grant to the University of Scranton for a workforce development program.

The remaining grants are almost exclusively going to western Pennsylvania.

“These grants from the Appalachian Regional Commission will invest in Pennsylvania’s coal communities to ensure that families and workers thrive,” Casey said in a media release.

Casey’s office said that, though no funding was awarded to Schuylkill County this year, it has in the past and can in the future. From other funding sources, the Shenandoah area has seen the most federal investment since the New Deal in recent years.

Funding from a previous year’s grant award from the Appalachian Regional Commission is helping to build the Center for Education, Business, and the Arts in Shenandoah.

The grants are through the Appalachian Regional Commission’s Partnerships for Opportunity and Workforce and Economic Revitalization (POWER) Initiative Casey’s office says is for communities affected by job losses in coal mining, coal power plant operations, and coal-related supply chain industries.

According to a 2001 article in Pennsylvania Heritage magazine, posted to the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, as many people were employed in Pennsylvania’s mines, 180,000, at Anthracite’s peak in the 1910s.

At the 1910 census, Shenandoah was home to 25,774 people, its peak, and the highest population a Schuylkill County municipality has ever seen. The Greater Shenandoah Area was home to nearly a dozen mines at that time.

One-by-one, they closed as demand for “hard coal” declined. Shenandoah’s population declined too, once growing at percentage rates no less than 25%, now declining at similar rates.

By 1970, Shenandoah’s population was below 10,000 for only the second census count in its history. The most recent population estimates show Shenandoah’s population as below 5,000.

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