Mayor Ginther joined several mayors from Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Kentucky in a plea for help from the federal government.
The mayors, which also included William Peduto (Pittsburgh), Jamael Tito Brown (Youngstown), Nan Whaley (Dayton), John Cranley (Cincinnati), Steve Williams (Huntington, W.Va.), Ron Dulaney Jr. (Morgantown W.Va.), and Greg Fisher (Louisville) wrote in an opinion piece in the Washington Post that they are asking for “…an ambitious federal response to save our industries and communities from destruction.”
The federal response they’re hoping for is a Marshall Plan for Middle America.
“In the post-World War II recovery period, the Marshall Plan was a $13 billion ($143 billion today) investment strategy to rebuild Europe and foster economic and democratic institutions,” reads the article. “Like postwar Europe, Middle America faces similar issues of decline — a shared crisis of aging infrastructure, obsolescence of business and government institutions, and the need for upskilling and reskilling the workforce.”
“We, the mayors of eight cities, are banding together to demand real investment in our shared region, which has fueled the U.S. economy for generations yet never gets the attention it deserves.”https://t.co/hJ9hIdGIiU
— Mayor Andrew Ginther (@MayorGinther) November 23, 2020
The mayors say that the region could lose up to 100,000 jobs as the fossil-fuel economy declines. With federal funding, they hope to create over 400,000 jobs across the region by “investing in renewable energy and energy efficiency upgrades to buildings, energy infrastructure and transportation assets.”
The group estimates that $60 billion per year over the next 10 years in the form of federal block grants to local governments, state utilization of tax credits and leveraging of lending programs and strategic equity investments, would be enough to boost the region to success.
To read the full piece on the Washington Post, please click here.
