This week’s biggest Winners & Losers

Pennsylvania potholes could become an endangered species in at least one part of the commonwealth. A five-year, $4.7 billion Transportation Improvement Plan set to modernize roads, interchanges and rapid transit in the region was approved by the Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission. The 10-county commission’s plan includes $2 billion for highway and bridge improvements alongside $2.7 billion in mass-transit investments. 

With this week’s federal approval of its merger with Philadelphia’s Peirce College, Scranton-based Lackawanna College is expanding its footprint into Southeastern Pennsylvania and adding degree programs, becoming the largest private, nonprofit, open-enrollment undergraduate institution in the commonwealth. Meanwhile, Peirce, a 161-year-old adults-focused institution, will become Lackawanna College - Philadelphia Center.

If Philadelphia continues on its current trajectory, the city will see fewer than 200 homicides for the first time since the 1960s – a major feat, considering the city grappled with a spike in violent crime coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the first week of July has typically been marked by a large number of shootings and other violent incidents, but this year the city saw just 23 shootings during the first week of July, which amounts to half the average number of shooting victims during the same period over the last 10 years.

iHeartMedia, which owns radio stations across the country – including those in downtown Erie – laid off that city’s last full-time on-air personalities, Allan Carpenter and Jessica Curry, in late June. Now, 25 years after the Rocket 101, Star 104, Froggy 94, the Planet, The Fan, and WJET 1400 were founded, terrestrial radio in Erie will never sound the same.

Enrollment in Pennie, the state’s healthcare marketplace, is already down nearly 20% this year, due to steep health insurance price hikes resulting from federal defunding of Affordable Care Act subsidies. For 2027, Pennsylvanians can expect even more pain, with rate hikes averaging 13%, according to one Pittsburgh insurance broker. Dan DeStefano, senior executive vice president at Liberty Insurance Agency in Mt. Lebanon, blamed health providers’ use of AI to more effectively bill insurers – costs that are then passed on to consumers.

A new report examining the 2024 assassination attempt on President Donald Trump in Butler found that the Secret Service failed to receive “102 radio transmissions that local law enforcement officers” related to a search for a suspicious person, which later turned out to be the shooter, Thomas Crooks. The report, released by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General, said the transmissions were made in a separate communications room, and that a joint communications room with members of all levels of law enforcement could have better protected the president, who was the presumptive GOP nominee at the time.