Category: default || By jt3y

We were crossing the Crawford Avenue bridge in Connellsville as Amtrak's Capitol Limited slowly chugged to the city's telephone-booth-like train station ... an Amshack, if you will.

"Hang on, I want to get a picture," I said to my friend Dan as I wheeled the sleek, gray Mercury onto South Arch Street.

"You don't have to hurry," he said. "It's not moving that fast. I think it's stopping."

The Merc screeched to a halt on West Fairview Avenue just as the crossing gates dropped and the Capitol's horn blew a warning. From behind the buildings to the right I could hear the big diesel-electrics revving up.

I threw the car into park and jumped out the door. "Oh, it's stopping, is it?" I had just about time to focus the camera and squeeze off three shots as the Cap accelerated east, towards Washington.

Dan --- who couldn't care less about trains, we were coming back from a car show in Uniontown --- was watching as the mail and express cars at the end of the Capitol disappeared around the curve. "Are those the cheap seats?" he asked.

"Something like that," I said, climbing back into the driver's seat. Someone had pulled up behind the Merc at the stop sign and was waiting impatiently for me to move. We hung a right onto Water Street and headed back through Connellsville.

A friend of mine has a saying about towns like McKeesport, Homestead, Braddock --- places that have been mercilessly batted around for the past 30 years. "What do you do with a place like that?" he says.

It's a rhetorical question. The problems are easy enough to identify: There are too few jobs, too little money, too much infrastructure for too few people (Our Fair City has lost about half of its population since 1950), and too many absentee landlords. What can you do, but survive and try to make things nice, even if it's just one little corner at a time?

The question applies equally well to Connellsville. Coal mining collapsed in Fayette County long before the steel industry collapsed in the Mon-Yough valley, and Connellsville --- which in the '40s and '50s was a thriving city --- is still feeling the hurt.

It doesn't help that some nimrod is going around setting buildings on fire. There's a large vacant lot now on Crawford Avenue --- the main street in Connellsville --- where Burns Drug Store used to be.

Uniontown, the seat of Fayette County, is getting a downtown facelift worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, but that's mostly through the largess of Fayette County Commissioner Joe Hardy --- the millionaire founder of 84 Lumber. Bully for Joe for putting his money where his mouth is, but Connellsville and McKeesport don't have a sugar daddy.

And besides, fixing up Downtown McKeesport won't fix the problems in the Jenny Lind Street area, to name one part of Our Fair City that's in bad trouble. Neither will putting a coat of paint on Downtown Uniontown fix its other blighted areas.

So, what would you do with a place like Connellsville? A lot of people would like to know.

...

An Alert Reader asked me over the weekend if I had seen a story in The Daily News about a proposed police merger between Liberty Borough, Port Vue, Glassport, Lincoln and Dravosburg.

I don't know how, but I missed it. (Chuck Gibson had the story.)

It's an excellent idea, in my humble opinion. Look, you have to provide police protection for your residents. Policing in a small town can take up to 60 or 70 percent of the budget (for many communities, it's the only service provided --- public works is often handled by the Council of Governments or private contractors).

The alternatives to having your own local police department are not great. You can rely on the state police, which in the Mon-Yough area could mean waiting a half-hour or more for emergency responses, and forget about routine patrols. (Both Clairton and Braddock were forced to rely on the state police in the 1980s --- no offense to the troopers, but no one in those towns looks back on that experience fondly.)

Or, you can purchase police service from another town, like Wilmerding and Wall have done. In that case, you're at the mercy of the other town's government. If they have a good police department, then your police protection is good. If it's bad, you're stuck with the contract. You have little or no voice in the police department's operation.

With a merger, a joint police commission is formed, including representatives from each of the towns. And, depending on how the commission's charter is written, each of the towns has a say in the policies and procedures that the police department follows.

Plus, the cost of administrative expenses and supplies is spread over a larger population. In communities like Liberty, Port Vue, Lincoln and Glassport, where many police officers work for more than one community, and where the departments back one another up on hot calls, it's a no-brainer.

The idea apparently had a warm reception at a meeting last week, according to Gibson's story, and it sounds as if longtime Liberty police Chief Luke Riley is among the advocates. That's a pretty brave stance, considering he could lose his job in a merged department --- or at the very least, might not be in charge. Riley deserves to be commended for sticking his neck out.

The proposal is now in the hands of the five borough councils. For the sake of the taxpayers, let's hope that they treat it seriously.

...

Three other Mon Valley communities are considering a police merger --- Charleroi, North Charleroi, Fallowfield Township, Speers and Twilight, which like the South Allegheny communities and Dravosburg are all contiguous, have estimated that a regional force would save taxpayers about $200,000 in the first year alone.

According to Karen Mansfield in the Observer-Reporter, the next meeting is set for Aug. 18 in Charleroi.

...

Updating a story we've been following at Tube City Almanac --- Cost-conscious newspapers are squeezing the funny out of their funny pages, according to Newsweek:

"Dilbert" cartoonist Scott Adams says he worries not only for himself ("Yes, I am that selfish") but for artists trying to break into the business who could inject new life into newspapers. "There are several up-and-coming cartoonists who I have great hope for. If you have fewer spaces, these new guys aren't going to get a chance."