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Trash, tech and talking arena: What to watch for during Philadelphia City Council’s return

Harrison Cann — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 16:23:15 -0400

Philadelphia City Council returns Thursday from a summer break saturated with America250 and FIFA World Cup fanfare.

But now, it’s back to business.

Council comes back to legislative session in City Hall after approving an annual budget in June that nixed Mayor Cherelle Parker’s proposed taxes on rideshare apps, retail delivery services and short-term rentals. This fall, councilmembers will pick up where they left off – and try to deal with issues that sprang up over the summer.

Here’s what to watch for:

Trash incineration talks

Trash talk will certainly continue in the fall. Councilmember Jamie Gauthier’s “Stop Trashing Our Air Act,” introduced in September 2025, has been an ongoing public and private debate around City Hall. Gauthier, who represents the 3rd councilmanic district, and environmental advocates have called for the city to stop sending its trash to Chester to be incinerated at a waste-to-energy facility known as the Delaware Valley Resource Recovery Facility.

The ordinance sparked heated debate and public comment throughout the year, but has failed to receive the support needed to get it across the legislative finish line. At the same time, the Parker administration began moving forward with a contract renewal with the incinerator in July.

The four-year contract would continue the city’s waste disposal processes in what City iof Philadelphia Managing Director Carlton Williams has said is a “financially sound, environmentally safe” deal.

On Wednesday, Williams and city officials announced new short- and long-term plans the city is undertaking to address the ongoing environmental and trash disposal concerns.

At the press conference, Councilmember Mark Squilla unveiled plans to introduce legislation that he said would “modernize” the city’s solid waste disposal process and more. The legislation, which has been coined the “Zero Waste and Circular Economy Act,” authorizes the administration to “develop a comprehensive, goal-oriented and data-driven plan to reduce and divert municipal solid waste for traditional disposal methods, including landfilling and incineration.”

Squilla, who represents the 1st councilmanic district, was joined by Councilmember Quetcy Lozada, Williams and members of the Parker administration in announcing the broader plans to overhaul how the city handles everything from trash and disposal to waste reduction and compost.

The long-term plans include developing an organic composting and processing capacity, implementing waste reduction policies, investigating the expansion of municipal food waste reduction and supporting food waste composting programs initiated by businesses and city agencies.

“Our ultimate goal is to (reduce) our reliance on outdated disposal facilities, including landfills and incinerators,” Williams said Wednesday. “We are extremely pleased to support Councilmember Squilla’s bill. It offers a real solution to reduce waste in a way that protects the environment. It converts waste to energy safely, without harming our city and our neighbors.”

Squilla emphasized the plan will focus on waste reduction as well as rethinking “how we collect, recycle, reuse and ultimately dispose of our waste.”

“It calls for the best way to responsibly transition from those current waste disposal practices that we do today to take advantage of new systems that can help reduce our emissions, improve public health, and drive economic (growth and) benefit job creation.”

Several councilmembers and community advocates – all of whom argue the incinerator’s pollution is an example of ongoing environmental racism – are holding a press conference Thursday morning outside City Hall to call on Council to reject Parker’s plans to renew the contract.

Council will need to approve legislation to move ahead with the city waste contract, setting the stage for what could be a messy month between lawmakers who won’t want trash delays to impact residents and those who want the city to do better with its waste disposal.

Sports arena saga

There’s always room for sports talk in Philly. Council may begin to consider legislation related to the proposed 76ers and Flyers arena in the South Philadelphia stadium complex – a proposal that came after Parker and Council leaders expended plenty of political capital giving initial approval to the controversial arena proposal in Center City.

Comcast Spectacor and Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment, which owns the Sixers, unveiled their plans for the new South Philadelphia arena last week, a project expected to be complete by 2030 – just in time for Philadelphia’s WNBA team’s inaugural season.

The organizations said the 50-50 joint venture will be the largest fully privately funded project in city history. The arena is expected to cost roughly $1.5 billion – a figure that is higher than the price tag of the original Center City arena design, which also faced questions over the use of public dollars.

Council President Kenyatta Johnson, whose Second Councilmanic District includes the stadium complex in South Philadelphia, said any future arena legislation will focus on community concerns with the potential project.

“The proposed arena is an exciting project for Philadelphia’s future,” Johnson said in a statement. “No zoning legislation is scheduled for introduction in Philadelphia City Council at this time, but the conversations are ongoing."

Big Tech takeover

With their enormous energy needs and pollution generation, data centers have quickly become a huge political talking point, and now the nationwide discussion has made its way to Philadelphia.

On Monday, roughly 100 protestors gathered outside City Hall to demand a moratorium on data center construction. So far, there are no artificial intelligence data centers proposed for Philadelphia. However, the city’s planning commission said last month there are two sites that could potentially support data centers – a city-owned site near the Northeast Philadelphia Airport and the site of the former PES refinery, now known as the Bellwether District.

And while Johnson hasn’t committed to a moratorium, his office said Council will continue to have discussions on the future of data centers in the city.

Education enigma

The School District of Philadelphia’s financial challenges – and its facilities plan, which includes the closure of 17 schools – will once again be atop the reading list for legislators. Council’s relationship with SDP and its leaders was put on full display last year as Superintendent Tony B. Watlington Sr. and school board members drew the ire of councilmembers and community advocates by questioning SDP’s fiscal transparency.

As part of the June budget agreement, Council allocated an additional $48 million to SDP to prevent short-term staffing cuts. But those one-time funds won’t prevent future cuts, meaning Council and the district must work to find both a short- and long-term solution for the district as it begins to rightsize its facility portfolio.

Johnson said Council will work to identify recurring funding for SDP, but it’s likely the ongoing funding talks will once again be leveraged throughout the year – and in city budget negotiations.

“One of councilmembers’ priorities will be securing recurring funding for the School District of Philadelphia in the Fiscal Year 2028 operating budget,” Johnson said. “In August, all members of City Council requested that City Controller Christy Brady conduct a comprehensive performance audit of the SDP’s management and operations. I know that the results of Controller Brady’s ongoing audit will help Council identify any available funds to support recurring funding for the SDP.”

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With ‘Former Fetterman Staffers’ ghosting X, we take matters into our own hands

City & State — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 18:00:00 -0400

As the political world waited … and waited … with bated breath to see what juicy information former staffers for U.S. Sen. John Fetterman promised to reveal about the controversial senator this week, that got us thinking: Since the vaunted and much-anticipated drop from the Former Fetterman Staffers X account detailing even more of the state’s senior senator’s bad behavior appears to be as hard to find as Fetterman in the Senate chambers after roll call, what kind of details would we like to see them reveal?

He is a Ravens fan

Perhaps nothing would hurt Fetterman’s approval numbers in Western Pennsylvania more than a shocking revelation that he is, in fact, a fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers' most hated division rival.

His Wawa Rewards total is higher than his My Sheetz Rewardz

Fetterman has long been a cheerleader for Sheetz, the Altoona-based gas station that offers an array of sandwiches, fried foods and other convenience store cuisine – he even participated in a City & State debate on the issue. But no one can resist the Sizzli specials, c’mon. Maybe the former Fetterman staffers planned to reveal that his loyalties really lay with Wawa. Food for thought.

When he dips out of the Senate early, it’s to work as a rideshare driver

As a way to keep his driving skills sharp following some high-profile incidents, he gets behind the wheel regularly to provide non-public transportation.

He relaxes at home in a bespoke suit

Every day is Casual Friday for Fetterman, whose uniform of a hoodie, shorts and sneakers – as iconic, at this point, as Anna Wintour’s bob and sunglasses – actually prompted the U.S. Senate to vote to relax its dress code in 2023. And nearly as unthinkable as Wintour in a hoodie is Fetterman in formalwear – but some of us are tickled at the image of a secretly dapper dad in dandy duds.

Levi Fetterman is behind the staffers account

Remember when Fetterman’s rescue dog, Levi Fetterman, had an active social media presence with thousands of followers and regularly posted to Twitter … er, X? Maybe he was using the “former staffers” account to renegotiate how many servings of the Farmer’s Dog he gets each day.

He is still thrown by scrapple

He knows it’s not Taylor pork roll, but he’s too afraid to ask exactly what it is at this point - and don’t get him started on Lebanon bologna!

He’s secretly a Chabad rabbi

His deep passion for all things Israel makes more sense when you consider his parallel secret career as a Hasidic man of the cloth. As do his frequent absences from his day job – all those holidays, prayers and kosher preparations take time.

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Pennsylvania politicians react to calls for an AI development slowdown

Justin Sweitzer — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 13:32:25 -0400

In a surprise move over the weekend, leaders of the nation’s top artificial intelligence companies joined forces to call for a global slowdown in AI development, warning that rapid advancements in AI technology pose the risk of humans losing control of AI systems as models have grown increasingly skilled at building the next generation of AI technology

In a viral blog post, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei expressed concerns that highly sophisticated rogue AI agents “could be capable of taking over the entire internet” in six to 12 months, and outlined a three-step plan to slow AI development and properly safeguard models; components of that plan were quickly endorsed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, xAI founder Elon Musk and Google DeepMind Chair Demis Hassabis. The agreement on slowing down the pace of AI development comes after multiple warnings from Anthropic researchers that AI “could kill us all by the end of the decade” – and quickly caught the attention of politicians across the U.S., including elected leaders in Pennsylvania.

City & State rounded up reactions from Pennsylvania elected officials, who have responded to the news with concern – and calls for action.

Gov. Josh Shapiro

Yesterday’s commentary by AI industry leaders should be heeded as a bright flashing red light telling the President and Congress they need to act now to regulate and rein in AI development.

This technology is powerful, with great potential to do good, and yet it comes with…
— Governor Josh Shapiro (@GovernorShapiro) September 13, 2026

Attorney General Dave Sunday

Over the course of the last year or so, I, along with many of my fellow attorneys general, have been leading the charge in protecting people from the overreach of Big Tech.

As I have said repeatedly, the advancement of technology and public safety cannot be mutually exclusive.… pic.twitter.com/LM8DvkdsIS
— PA Attorney General Dave Sunday (@PAAttorneyGen) September 14, 2026

U.S. Rep. Chris Deluzio

Our government needs to pump the brakes and take action on AI safety and development. America should lead the rest of the world in coordinated action for the sake of humanity. https://t.co/HOkCkM8oFT
— Chris Deluzio (@ChrisForPA) September 12, 2026

U.S. Rep. Brendan Boyle

One of the most important things you can read today… https://t.co/bceXbWdkoe
— Congressman Brendan Boyle (@RepBrendanBoyle) September 12, 2026

This story will be updated to include additional responses from Pennsylvania elected officials.

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Pennsylvania looms large at GOP’s ‘Trump-a-palooza’ midterm convention

Justin Sweitzer — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 17:14:45 -0400

Republicans held a two-day convention in Dallas to energize Republican voters ahead of this year’s midterm elections – called “Trump-a-palooza” by some – that featured appearances from President Donald Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, House Speaker Mike Johnson and a host of GOP candidates seeking reelection in November.

Trump headlined both nights of the convention, where he framed the midterms as “one of the most important elections in our country’s history” and assailed the Democratic Party. “Your vote will decide whether our country stumbles at the starting gate of the next 250 years, or surges forward and never, ever looks back,” he said.

Trump said if Republicans keep control of Congress, they will make his signature tax cuts permanent and advance a new health care plan. He also promised a $5,000 dividend for all U.S. adults if the GOP wins the midterms, but didn’t say how he would finance the payments. “If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate … I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000,” Trump said, noting that dividend recipients would be required to spend the money in the U.S.

While Trump took center stage at the midterm convention, Pennsylvania’s significance loomed over the historic midterm gathering. U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick underscored the stakes of this year’s midterm elections and touted recent investments in the commonwealth totaling more than $100 billion. U.S. Reps. Ryan Mackenzie and Rob Bresnahan, both facing competitive challenges in their respective districts, also spoke at the convention, while Democratic U.S. Sen. John Fetterman made a surprise appearance by video to introduce McCormick.

John Fetterman makes an appearance at the GOP convention

Just days after a scathing Wall Street Journal report portrayed him as having little interest in his day-to-day duties as a U.S. senator – a piece that enraged members of his own party – U.S. Sen. John Fetterman appeared at the Dallas GOP convention via video to introduce his Republican colleague and friend, U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick.

Fetterman, a Democrat, has increasingly distanced himself from his own party since being elected in 2028. He’s dined with President Donald Trump, become one of the Senate’s most vocal defenders of Israel, and has not shied away from critiquing the leftward drift of the Democratic Party.

“I’m a common-sense Democrat,” Fetterman said in the video played at the convention. “I’m always going to stand with America. I’m always going to reject the extremes and socialism and that anti-American way of life. Dave McCormick is the kind of senator that gets the job done, and he’s going to fight for Pennsylvania.”

NEW

Senator John Fetterman introduced Senator Dave McCormick at the GOP Convention this evening via video.

Fetterman says in the video, among other things:

“I’m a common-sense Democrat. I’m always gonna stand with America. I’m always gonna reject the extremes in socialism… pic.twitter.com/MXE8QsnkV9
— Yashar Ali (@yashar) September 9, 2026

McCormick touts Pennsylvania’s economy while underscoring stakes of the midterms

In a 10-minute speech on the first day of the convention, McCormick highlighted the pivotal role Pennsylvania has played throughout the nation’s history, while making the case that the commonwealth will be critical to the country’s future.

“Today we are building America’s future again,” McCormick said. “Westinghouse is launching a new era of nuclear power. Drug manufacturing is booming in the Lehigh Valley. Hanwha is investing $5 billion in the Philadelphia shipyard, and President Trump and I have announced over $100 billion in energy, AI and defense, bringing tens of thousands of great jobs to Pennsylvania.”

McCormick, who was joined onstage by steel and manufacturing workers, praised Trump and members of Pennsylvania’s congressional delegation for securing a deal to keep U.S. Steel’s headquarters in Pittsburgh.

The Republican senator also raised concerns about recent wins by self-professed Democratic Socialist candidates across the United States, noting that his grandfather was a Democrat who campaigned for Franklin Delano Roosevelt and “wouldn’t recognize his party today.”

“Democrats told us to excuse Nazi tattoos. Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee campaigns with a man who said America, and I quote, ‘deserved 9/11.’ This radical movement excuses lawlessness. It vilifies the police. It disparages our military. It attacks our business. It spews antisemitism, and it celebrates those who despise America,” McCormick said.

“My friends, the choice is clear,” he added. “Will we dream heroic dreams and build a better future, or will we surrender to socialism, defeatism, anti-Americanism? I refuse to surrender. President Trump refuses to surrender. This November, there can be no surrender.”

WATCH: Pennsylvania Senator Dave McCormick's full speech at the 2026 Republican Convention

"There is no doubt that the Republican Party is the party of the American worker, and Pennsylvania proves it." pic.twitter.com/1xyoP7AQgI
— Republicans (@Republicans) September 9, 2026

Bresnahan and Mackenzie praise Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill

Facing competitive races this November, U.S. Reps. Rob Bresnahan and Ryan Mackenzie were both speakers at the GOP’s midterm convention.

Speaking on the convention’s first day, Bresnahan, who is running against Scranton Mayor Paige Cognetti in November, focused on the impact that Trump’s signature tax bill, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, will have on Pennsylvania workers’ bottom lines. He said the law’s deduction for overtime pay will have positive ripple effects throughout Pennsylvania communities. “That extra money reaches places like the diner down the street, the local grocery store and the family buying their first home. That’s how you build communities where people can stay, raise a family and build a life,” he said. Bresnahan also touted his support for career and technical education and Northeastern Pennsylvania’s manufacturing sector.

WATCH: Pennsylvania Rep. Rob Bresnahan's full speech at the 2026 Republican Convention

"Manufacturing runs deep in Pennsylvania...Our future depends on making what America needs right here at home with American workers, not relying on other countries to do it for us." pic.twitter.com/WwDkDZv3Wq
— Republicans (@Republicans) September 9, 2026

Mackenzie, who is facing a challenge from Bob Brooks, a firefighters union president, spoke on the second day of the convention. He highlighted his voting record in Congress and celebrated Trump’s signature tax bill. “We delivered tax relief for every American by locking in lower rates and expanding the standard deduction. We added no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, and no tax on Social Security,” Mackenzie said. “We fought for working families, expanding the child tax credit, making tax credits permanent for things like paid family leave and child care, and creating Trump accounts.” Mackenzie also took a shot at Brooks, calling him a “far-left nutjob” supported by establishment Democrats.

Brooks, meanwhile, labeled Mackenzie a “lapdog” ahead of the event, which he referred to as a “lapdog convention.”

Lapdog Mackenzie takes the wrong turn every single time. pic.twitter.com/ukzfvhqORv
— Bob Brooks (@VoteBobBrooks) September 9, 2026

Democrats accuse GOP lawmakers of prioritizing Trump over Pennsylvania voters

Pennsylvania Democratic Party Chair Eugene DePasquale criticized Pennsylvania Republicans who traveled to Texas for the convention, accusing them of being more loyal to Trump than to Pennsylvania voters' needs.

DePasquale said in a statement that Mackenzie, Bresnahan and U.S. Rep. Scott Perry “care more about Donald Trump’s cost-raising agenda than what’s best for the people of Pennsylvania … After jetting all the way to Texas to champion an agenda of higher gas prices, cost-raising tariffs, and healthcare cuts, Mackenzie, Bresnahan, Perry, and the entire PA GOP have proven that they’ll put Trump ahead of our Commonwealth every single time – and Pennsylvanians are ready to send them packing this November,” DePasquale said.

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State House and Assembly Speakers from Pennsylvania, Delaware, Illinois, New York convene in Philadelphia for historic panel

Harrison Cann — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 16:56:16 -0400

On Thursday morning, Black political leaders from Pennsylvania, New York, Illinois and Delaware met for a conversation on the country’s founding – and its future – at Mother Bethel AME Church, the oldest African Methodist Episcopal congregation in the United States.

“Your voice matters,” state House Speaker Joanna McClinton said, speaking to attendees. “When we see the attacks nationally on our right to vote, there is a role for all of us to play now, from the wisest to the youngest.”

McClinton hosted the panel at Mother Bethel AME Church, which sits on the oldest parcel of land in the U.S. continuously owned by African-Americans – a point speakers and church leaders emphasized against the backdrop of America’s semiquincentennial.

Titled “A More Perfect Union: from Independence to Inclusion, 250 years of American Democracy,” the panel focused on the evolution of American democracy and the key role that local and state politics play in protecting civil liberties – and was led by McClinton, Illinois state House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch, Delaware state House Speaker Melissa Minor-Brown and New York state Assembly Speaker Carl E. Heastie.

“How are we, in this modern age, going to make sure that we don’t see a resurgence of racism, of misogyny, of stop signs and barriers?” McClinton asked. “We have to have some urgency like we’ve never had in the past.”

Minor-Brown, Welch and Heastie are the first Black officials to hold their respective positions, and McClinton, who took over as House Speaker when Democrats took control of the lower chamber in 2023, is the first woman to serve as Speaker of the Pennsylvania House.

When asked about inclusion – a central theme of the discussion – Heastie told City & State that just the fact that inclusion is a topic of conversation is a clear indication that “this country is not living up to the premise of treating all people the same.”

“It is a reminder that we still have to work towards having this country be more inclusive and more equitable, for everyone,” Heastie said after Thursday’s event. “The four of us (panelists), we communicate a lot about what’s going on in our states … I think these conversations take (on) a more important (role), particularly on the eve of what could be – and I know we say this every two years – the most important election of my lifetime.”

With much of the discussion focused on voting rights and the role of state legislatures as laboratories of democracy, the panelists stressed the need for community engagement to get people out to vote and make their voices heard through their representatives.

“We have 50 states and we have six Black (state House) Speakers,” Welch said Thursday. “How do we fight? We’ve got to vote.”

Minor-Brown said she gets “heartburn” thinking of celebrating the country’s 250th anniversary, knowing the country’s racial history and what previous generations went through before people like herself got a seat at the table.

“I think it’s really important that we hold ourselves accountable to – and be honest about – the fact that we have so much further to go,” Minor-Brown said Thursday. “Yes, celebrate the wins, but understand that we can’t be comfortable.”

On the eve of the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, panelists also spoke on the lasting impact of 9/11.

“It becomes a moment of reflection in New York, and even (across) this country,” Heastie said, who added that the U.S. often sees New York City as a bellwether of the state of both politics and government competence.

“We often feel like the rest of the U.S. looks to us to provide leadership,” said Heastie, when asked about protecting elections and voting rights. “We actually do kind of work well” with Hochul “when it comes to trying to step in when the federal government has come up short.”

McClinton, who plugged her sweeping election reform bill during her remarks, said the state’s divided legislature has gotten in the way of additional progress.

“People are interviewing me saying, ‘What happened to transit funding? Why aren’t skill games regulated?’” she continued. “Well, my good friends in the Republican-controlled Senate have decided they don't want to do their job. So voters have an opportunity to make a different decision on Tuesday, Nov. 3rd.”

As the panel closed and the legislators looked forward to the next 250 years, each gave their own take on how much “more work needs to be done.”

“I really just want there to be a day where you can see that hope has been instilled in people. I’m honored to serve as the first Black speaker, but I don’t want to be the last,” Minor-Brown concluded. “I can’t wait for a day when there’s no more ‘firsts’ – it’s just the norm.”

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This week’s biggest Winners & Losers

City & State — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 16:20:59 -0400

While U.S. Sen. John Fetterman has said he has no intention of leaving the Democratic Party, his actions tell a different story as he continues to distance himself from Democrats – and fraternize across the aisle. A bruising Wall Street Journal report recently accused Fetterman of having little interest in the day-to-day duties of a senator, drawing widespread condemnation from Democratic colleagues, and his recent video appearance at the GOP’s midterm convention only further raised the stakes for fellow Dems, who cannot risk losing his membership when control of the Senate is suddenly in sight.

Keep reading for more winners and losers!

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Stitch, please: Philadelphia’s Chinatown hopes a highway cap can reconnect the community

Harrison Cann — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 15:23:01 -0400

When John Chin took the microphone on Aug. 6 at Philadelphia's Chinatown Community Park, it was the culmination of years of hard work, hard-won partnerships and hard lessons.

“Tonight, we celebrate our collective work to bring this once-in-a-lifetime project to this point: the Chinatown Stitch,” Chin, executive director of the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corporation, said to the crowd. “Chinatown Stitch grew out of a desire to reconnect Chinatown over the Vine Street Expressway. The Stitch is our solution for Chinatown, which has been harmed for several decades.”

That harm Chin mentioned so prominently has its origins in the 1970s – and Chinatown residents and PCDC fought against the Vine Street Expressway from the beginning. In 1977, when an environmental impact statement related to connecting I-76 and I-95, PCDC was vehemently opposed, arguing the expressway would negatively impact the physical, economic, and cultural character of the neighborhood. Despite neighborhood pushback, expressway construction began in the 1980s and was completed in 1991.

Sarah McEneaney, who moved to the nearby Callowhill neighborhood in 1979, has seen the area’s evolution over more than four decades. She said that even prior to the expressway’s construction, Vine Street’s width was a “deterrent” for pedestrians and bicyclists.

“There's been many things that have caused the divide between parts of Chinatown,” McEneaney told City & State. “Vine Street has always been an issue (with) getting across it, especially walking or biking.”

McEneaney, a founding member of the Callowhill Neighborhood Association, has been a community activist for years and has worked alongside PCDC and neighborhood organizations to advocate for residents and the local community.

She said the Callowhill neighborhood and the nearby areas, including Chinatown, have improved drastically since she first moved there.

“In the neighborhood, in the early days, nighttime was especially desolate and empty and scary,” McEneaney told City & State. “Nowadays, I have tons of neighbors and people walking, day and night, through the neighborhood. (They’re) walking their dogs and going to different restaurants and going to the rail park – it's a very different place.”

A major barrier – both literally and metaphorically – to truly connecting the community is the expressway cutting through Chinatown.

Central Lawn rendering | City of Philadelphia/WSP/OJB Landscape Architecture

Park Entrance rendering | City of Philadelphia/WSP/OJB Landscape Architecture

11th Street Garden rendering | City of Philadelphia/WSP/OJB Landscape Architecture

Now, decades later, the same community organizations are leading the charge to bridge the gap in Chinatown that the expressway created. Years in the making, the Chinatown Stitch is a highway-capping project, first pitched more than a decade ago, that’s expected to reconnect the two halves of Chinatown divided by the expressway construction, creating a neighborhood-focused park in the process.

“We’re all so excited about the Stitch because that's a real improvement that would make a real, real difference,” McEneaney added. “Anybody I talk to about it totally wants it to happen.”

The project faced a major setback last year when President Donald Trump’s administration rescinded nearly all the federal funding project organizers received through community connectivity grants. The rollback took away $150.5 million from the project, which is estimated to cost roughly $200 million.

Despite the funding rug getting pulled out from underneath them, organizers like Chin — and city officials — are convinced the project’s momentum and community-focused design will get it across the finish line sooner rather than later.

“It’s all about reconnection,” Chin said as he stood in front of the market stalls designed to be used inside the street-level park plaza – a first glimpse at some of the infrastructure that has resulted from years of community engagement.

Kara Medow, the City of Philadelphia Office of Transportation and Infrastructure Systems (OTIS) senior capital projects manager, said that partnerships and community engagement are “all critical to the success of the Chinatown Stitch project.”

“These market stalls … show the project’s potential and offer a preview of the new community spaces the stitch will bring,” Medow said at the Aug. 6 event. “Together, we can reunite Chinatown and give this community a beautiful green space it has long deserved.”

District divided

Ever since the construction of I-676, Chinatown North and Chinatown South – the main commercial corridor in the neighborhood – have been separated by a multi-lane barrier that sees more than 100,000 vehicles a day.

Erick Guerra, a professor of regional planning at the University of Pennsylvania and associate dean for research at the Weitzman School of Design, told City & State there’s a long history of “destruction of urban neighborhoods for the construction of urban highways” — and Philadelphia’s Chinatown is a prime example.

“I think things like the Vine Street Expressway never should’ve been built,” Guerra said, adding that urban highways “are worth less than the land that they take up, particularly when you account for all the damage that they do — and there are neighborhoods like Chinatown that bear a disproportionate brunt of those kinds of costs.”

Philadelphia isn’t the only city working to rectify past highway divisions. The stitch concept – utilized in projects including Seattle’s Freeway Park and the ongoing Penn’s Landing Park over I-95 and Columbus Boulevard – has become a modern piece of urban infrastructure built to reconnect neighborhoods and create green space above existing highways.

PCDC and neighborhood organizers have long fought against disruptive developments, including stadium proposals and more.

“The people who lived on the north side felt disconnected to the south side,” Chin told City & State. “The north side is still very underdeveloped, and people who live on the north side feel like they’re living in a place that has less amenities and services … I think once Stitch is implemented, they're going to feel and see this natural connection.”

Funding frenzy

The Stitch saga has taken a number of turns since the design was pitched roughly a decade ago.

The massive infrastructure project, which would create a two-and-a-half-block street-level park on top of I-676, is seen by many as the perfect opportunity for PCDC and neighborhood activists to reconnect the divided district.

PCDC collaborated with city and state officials and received two grants in 2022 and 2024 to secure the funding needed to move the project out of the design phase and into reality. The project received $1.8 million from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law’s Reconnecting Communities Pilot program and, two years later, $158.9 million from the Inflation Reduction Act.

With funding in place, the project moved ahead and is now on the verge of finalizing designs and construction documents. But last year, the Trump-backed One Big Beautiful Bill undid many environmental and reconnectivity programs passed under the Biden administration.

The Chinatown Stitch was one of many projects to have nearly all of its federal funding rescinded. City officials said while it’s highly unusual to see these types of grants rescinded, it’s not common for federal funds to be held up for one reason or another.

“These are the kinds of punches that you need to roll with whenever you have a large infrastructure project,” Chris Puchalsky, director of policy and strategic initiatives at OTIS, told City & State. “The silver lining is that we have more time to design it in a thoughtful way, working with the community.”

Preliminary funding had already been allocated for the planning process and final construction documents. Only the construction cost – in the range of $150 million, according to officials – is standing in the way of organizers getting the project across the finish line.

After the federal funding was pulled, local leaders had to scramble – looking to the city and the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission to step up. Both did their part, with DVRPC allocating $10 million and the city offering a $2.5 million local match – the figure needed to fund the rest of the design process and final construction documents, which could take six months to a year.

"This funding will be sufficient for the project to complete engineering plans and be shovel-ready,” an OTIS spokesperson said in a statement. “Every day, we move the project forward, thanks to partners like PennDOT, DVRCP staff, and suburban counties who have all been supportive of the Stitch. We will continue to work with community partners like the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corporation and elected officials to secure future funding."

Puchalsky said the first draft plans were submitted back to the city and state agencies in May and that they can move toward final design plans after they get environmental approval, which is expected in the coming weeks.

He said that Philadelphia – alongside localities who also saw their project funding get pulled last year – will advocate for reconnecting community funds to be reinstated.

“There are projects in Oregon and in New York and in Arkansas and a bunch of other places that lost funding, and so we're all trying to work together,” he added. “(We hope to work) with those folks to form something of a national coalition to advocate for restoration.”

Cap construction

Nevertheless, Chinatown persisted.

With preliminary funding in tow, the project is moving forward as the design process is finalized and aspects of the park – such as the market stalls – are constructed.

City Councilmember Mark Squilla, who represents Chinatown as part of his district, said both the city and the Chinatown community remain excited and committed to keeping the project “shovel-ready.”

“The excitement from the community was over the top (when it was announced), and people really looked at it as a great opportunity to right a wrong,” Squilla told City & State. “To see that the government came in and did this (damage with the highway), but now they're going to help us fix it.”

Guerra told City & State that highway caps are becoming a more common means to “undo” some of the harm urban highways have caused. These projects, he said, should “focus on the social impacts, the economic impacts, and to a lesser extent, the environmental impacts.”

“One of the challenges of capping is that it rarely kind of frees up more land for real estate,” Guerra said. “It creates a nice environment, better urban design, but it’s not creating the kinds of private land uses that the highway replaced that generate tax revenue (and) add substantial value to the city.”

Aerial rendering | City of Philadelphia/WSP/OJB Landscape Architecture

The Stitch “is much more about reconnecting a community, a public infrastructure investment offsetting some harm,” he added.

The latest design for the capped park between 10th and 12th streets includes landscaped pathways; a playground, plaza and shaded pavilion; and a stream. The cap will also create a road diet for the surrounding Vine Street area, which Chin called “significant safety improvements” for pedestrians and cyclists navigating in and around the park. The road diet is said to include a reduction in lanes to two in each direction, the addition of curb-protected bike lanes and bump-outs, and the shortening of pedestrian crossings across Vine Street.

Speaking at the Chinatown Community Park on Aug. 6, Chin assured the audience that the “designs reflect your desires.”

“As far as the Stitch design, we’re near the finish line,” Chin said. “You have said that you want a gathering space, celebration space and just a place to be with others.”

Federal funding isn’t out of the question going forward – but organizers believe it will take contributions from a variety of sources, including public and philanthropic funds, to make up for the nearly $200 million that was rescinded.

Congress restored $30 million in funding for larger Reconnecting Communities grants, a pot that Stitch organizers could tap into to get a portion of the funding back. Meanwhile, city officials expect to receive federal environmental approval this spring, based on review of already completed studies and plans.

The goal for Chin, Puchalsky, Squilla and others is to have the project as “shovel-ready” as possible. That way, Squilla said, public officials will jump at the opportunity to fund it when the dollars become available.

“I know we hit some roadblocks, but we're not letting that slow us down. We're going to continue to move forward and find the resources,” Squilla told City & State. “When we have it shovel-ready, when there is any opportunity to fund any of these infrastructure projects, (I believe) that would be one of the top priorities for the feds or anybody else.”

When asked if the project is up in the air, Chin said that given the momentum they have, nothing will stop them from getting the Chinatown Stitch they’ve long dreamed of.

“Back in 2016, it was an ‘if’ question, but we got some significant federal resources,” Chin told City & State. Now, he added, “it’s really ‘when.’”

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The curious case of Andrew Tupone, the Green Party and PA’s 7th Congressional District

Justin Sweitzer — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 15:19:42 -0400

It hasn’t been easy being green for Andrew Tupone, the aspiring congressional candidate in Pennsylvania’s 7th Congressional District.

Tupone, a longtime Republican who changed his party affiliation to the Democratic Party in February before ultimately settling on the Green Party, planned to run in this year’s congressional race against Republican U.S. Rep. Ryan Mackenzie and Democratic challenger Bob Brooks. He appeared to obtain the necessary signatures to run under the Green Party banner – but there was one major problem: The Green Party of Pennsylvania had never heard of him.

Tupone, who filed more than 10,000 signatures in his effort to get on the ballot this November, said he had grown disillusioned with both major political parties and decided to run as a Green Party candidate after briefly considering a Democratic bid. Democrats accused him of being a Republican Party plant entering the race to pull votes away from Brooks, while the Green Party of Pennsylvania said he had no affiliation with them and that “an effort to achieve ballot access in an un-transparent manner is underway.”

What followed was a months-long battle over Tupone’s candidacy, with Tupone fighting to stay on the ballot as Democrats and Greens alike sought to remove him from the ballot ahead of this November’s general election. In early September, Commonwealth Court Judge Stella Tsai ordered Tupone to be removed from the ballot; Tupone has vowed to keep fighting and said he has already filed an appeal.

Below, City & State examines the timeline of events that led to Tupone’s removal from the ballot in Pennsylvania’s 7th Congressional District race – and what may come next in the battle for this crucial Lehigh Valley seat.

July 21, 2026: In mid-June, the Green Party of Pennsylvania sent out a press release warning Pennsylvania voters that several candidates were seeking to make the November general election ballot as Green Party candidates – without the support of the Green Party.

The party noted that some unendorsed candidates who publicly claimed to represent the Green Party “only recently changed their affiliation to the Green Party after previously being registered as Democrats, Republicans or Independents.”

“It is apparent that an effort to achieve ballot access in an un-transparent manner is underway,” the party said.

July 30, 2026: Punchbowl News reported on July 30 that Tupone, who was registered as a Republican as recently as 2025, had submitted signatures to run as a Green Party candidate in this year’s election in the state’s 7th Congressional District. He told the outlet that no one recruited him to run and that he didn’t pay anyone to circulate petitions for his nomination.

“People are fed up with both parties and over 9,000 voters want to see another option on the ballot,” he said in a statement to the outlet. However, Punchbowl reported that some Pennsylvania residents were approached about signing Tupone’s nomination petitions, and those circulating them said they were being paid to collect signatures. “One petitioner said he was making $30 an hour but wouldn’t say who was paying him,” Punchbowl reported.

According to a press release announcing his candidacy, Tupone's top agenda items include addressing affordability and ending corruption in politics. He also said he supports “fighting climate change” and “ending the genocide in Gaza.”

Tupone has worked in the public and private sectors and is a certified emergency medical technician.

Aug. 10, 2026: Tupone’s nominating papers faced two separate objections. One objection came from the Green Party of Pennsylvania itself, which accused Tupone of trying to mislead voters by misrepresenting his relationship with the party, as he was not endorsed by the party or encouraged to run for the seat by party officials.

Tina Olson, a Green Party voter from Northampton County who has been registered with the party since 2020, said in a statement that she was alarmed to learn that Tupone was running as a Green Party candidate. “I have been a resident of the Lehigh Valley for over 30 years and a registered Green Party voter since 2020. I have been a contact person for the Lehigh Valley Greens and have never heard of Andrew Tupone,” Olson said.

“What was most alarming is that Tupone bypassed the entire rigorous vetting process to use our party name without approval,” she added. “This should lead voters to speculate on Tupone’s possible nefarious motives. He should not remain on the ballot, falsely claiming that he represents the Green Party.”

The other objection came from three 7th Congressional District voters – Joyce Moore, Susan Baranek and Louise Dillensnyder – who, in making their case for Tupone’s removal as a 7th Congressional District candidate, labeled him as “a spoiler candidate to distract progressive voters with that party label in an effort to reelect Congressman Ryan Mackenzie.”

Their legal objection stated that several people circulating petitions for Tupone were from outside the state, and “include multiple recent Republican candidates for office, Libertarian Party leaders, and at least one individual with a serious criminal record.” The filing alleged that one of the circulators was Colin McEvers, a resident of Anne Arundel County, Maryland, and a current Republican candidate seeking a seat in the Maryland House of Delegates’ 32nd District.

Aug. 20, 2026: According to a transcript from an Aug. 20 hearing on the voters’ objection to Tupone’s nomination papers, McEvers spent about two weeks circulating petitions for Tupone and was paid to do so, but not by Tupone. He said a colleague told him about the opportunity and directed him to a person named David working on the ground in Pennsylvania. McEvers said he didn’t recall David’s last name, and said he was paid $7 per signature collected via Venmo by a company called 1st Amendment Pros, or 1st Amendment Professionals.

Tupone’s attorney, prominent GOP lawyer Wally Zimolong, pointed out that it’s not illegal to pay individuals to collect signatures. “Circulators are often paid. They’re often paid in the case of smaller-party candidates because it’s hard to find people,” he said in the deposition reviewed by City & State.

During the hearing, Tupone said he filed his nomination papers in coordination with his attorneys and did not know who filed them with the state. He said he did not personally pay anyone to circulate petitions for him.

Zimolong also challenged the motivations behind the objections to Tupone’s candidacy, asserting that the two challenges were for political gain. “Let’s make it clear this isn’t about adherence to the Election Code. It’s for political gain. The Democrat (sic) Party wants Mr. Tupone off the ballot,” he said.

Sept. 4, 2026: In an opinion filed in early September, Tsai ordered Tupone to be removed from the ballot, noting that the court’s analysis “respects the internal governance of political bodies and protects political bodies from external forces hijacking those bodies.”

The opinion noted that Tupone asserted his right to be the nominee of the Green Party without the party’s nomination, making the case that “signatures are the nomination.”

“This cannot be the case, because the electors signing the nomination papers in support of the person appearing on the ballot are not necessarily members of the Green Party,” Tsai wrote. “To hold otherwise would allow non-Green Party electors to select the candidate for the Green Party, usurping the Green Party’s ability to nominate its own candidate.”

Tsai wrote in her opinion that the court found Tupone’s testimony to be “largely credible,” while adding that “he was less than forthcoming about the type and level of assistance he received from others in the circulation and filing of his nomination papers.”

Green Party of Pennsylvania Co-chair Tom Runkle said in a statement that the decision “ensures voters can be confident that when they see a Green on the ballot that person has committed to the Four Pillars and Ten Key Values of the Green Party of Pennsylvania.

“We do not tolerate the underhanded and deceptive tactics which have soured our elections and discourage participation. The members of the two corporate parties have their primary elections to decide their representation,” he added. “Green voters are prevented from such privilege; our members, however, nominate Green candidates, and Judge Tsai has determined that must be respected in accordance with the laws of the Commonwealth.”

Tupone, however, vowed to appeal the decision, stating that 7th Congressional District voters deserve a progressive choice in this year’s election.

“The establishment parties are fighting to keep me off the ballot but I’m not backing down. I will continue this fight and have already filed an appeal to this decision because the people of the 7th congressional district deserve a real choice and a true progressive candidate who will stand up for them,” he said in a statement.

“This fight isn’t over,” he added. “I’m going to keep fighting for the voters to have an option and for the representation our community deserves.”

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Can’t find a Fetterman: Social media savages the U.S. senator’s disappearing acts

City & State PA staff — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 13:00:09 -0400

If there was an Oprah’s Book Club-Newspaper Division for political junkies, the current selection would hands-down be this article from the Wall Street Journal confirming everyone’s worst fears and best guesses about U.S. Sen. John Fetterman. How do we know everyone is reading about the state’s senior senator blowing off vets, belittling patient cost concerns from one of the world’s best children’s hospitals and doing his best Ferris Bueller for Senate attendance? By the savage tweets below:

U.S. Rep. Chris Deluzio

There is a lot I could say about this report of John Fetterman’s pathetic behavior as a Senator. But between the laziness, disrespect, and willingness to carry water for a foreign government, it shows us something we already know: this man has no sense of duty.

He is not up for… https://t.co/mT95qlSRJt
— Chris Deluzio (@ChrisForPA) September 4, 2026

U.S. Rep. Brendan Boyle

John Fetterman is a disgrace. Our state deserves better than a lazy trust fund baby who is too lazy to do the job. https://t.co/B2maiWqGAE
— Congressman Brendan Boyle (@RepBrendanBoyle) September 4, 2026

State Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta, who lost the 2022 Senate primary to Fetterman

This report is horrifying, but not new to many of us in PA. John barely showed up as LG and is constantly MIA as our Senator.

When he’s not on FOX cheerleading Trump & endless wars, he is attacking the very neighbors who gave him a chance.

2028 can’t come soon enough. https://t.co/lmwn8Xwcrv
— Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta (@malcolmkenyatta) September 4, 2026

Former U.S. Rep. Conor Lamb, who also lost the 2022 Senate primary to Fetterman

John, @SenFettermanPA if there is a decent bone left in your body, just quit. It’s an insult to decent people in our state for you to treat them and the office this way. https://t.co/tdzWpShywt
— Conor Lamb (@ConorLambPA) September 4, 2026

And let’s not leave out quality work by others in the politisphere:

Former Republican U.S. Rep. Joe Walsh

John Fetterman really ought to think about resigning. He’s just not doing the job of a United States Senator. Not even close. He’s not well. He needs help. He should resign.
— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) September 4, 2026

Sean Kitchen

Another Fetterman story has hit the group chats https://t.co/TZAPLz7i4c pic.twitter.com/EsCJeDHHRC
— sean kitchen (@sean_kitchen89) September 4, 2026

Jerome Benjamin

Everyone: Is John Fetterman going to resign???

John Fetterman at work tomorrow: https://t.co/uTR7weZzaJ pic.twitter.com/C1vR2IqEJz
— Jerome Benjamin (@BRSBenji) September 4, 2026

Sam

we all owe Conor Lamb a major apology https://t.co/GLwW9ziRvi pic.twitter.com/MF2D0dtCf0
— sam (@sam_d_1995) September 4, 2026

Alex Clearfield

CHOP is the most popular thing in Philly besides the Eagles https://t.co/1gkJlOMD4A
— Alex Clearfield (@AlexClearfield) September 4, 2026

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This week’s biggest Winners & Losers

City & State — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 15:51:28 -0400

Is it really still summer? With many Pennsylvania kids halfway through their first month of school and the governor making one major announcement after another, commonwealth denizens could be forgiven for mistaking the week before Labor Day for sometime in mid-fall. But with the cicada symphony at its peak and the fireflies still out, the winners will be those taking the time to lounge in linen, savor the sunshine and take a break before midterms madness takes over.

Keep reading for more winners and losers!

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Report: Teacher shortages hitting both rural and urban school districts

Harrison Cann — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 15:13:54 -0400

School’s back in session, but districts across the commonwealth continue to be hindered by a dramatically worsening teacher shortage.

According to a report from the Center for Rural Pennsylvania, a long-term teacher shortage, combined with supply and demand issues in education, is affecting school districts in both rural and urban areas.

That shortage includes a 67% decrease in the number of individuals obtaining teacher certifications in just over a decade, according to research by Edward J. Fuller, an associate professor in the College of Education at Penn State University.

“The supply of new teachers has declined substantially and is insufficient to meet demand of both rural and urban districts,” the report reads. “Demand has increased through elevated attrition and changes in student characteristics for both rural and urban districts.”

The report, which looked at state administrative data from 2014 to 2025, found that teacher supply fell substantially between 2013 and 2017, declining by 66% in that period – and that supply has not recovered.

“Pennsylvania’s schools depend on a strong and stable teacher workforce," state Sen. Gene Yaw, a Republican from Lycoming County and chair of the Center for Rural PA, said in a statement. “These findings can help inform continued efforts to strengthen Pennsylvania's teacher pipeline and ensure students have access to qualified educators.”

The report also found that both urban and rural school districts have many teachers working in areas outside their certifications, as well as an increasing number of teachers working on emergency teaching permits since the pandemic. While teacher quality tended to be higher in rural districts than in their urban counterparts, career and technical education in rural areas lagged behind the rest of the state.

“The sharp increase in emergency permits and the persistent use of out-of-field teaching assignments indicate that many rural and urban districts continue to face significant teacher shortages, which may affect instructional quality,” the report states.

Zachary L. Adams, executive director of the Center for Rural Pennsylvania, told City & State that “grow-your-own” teacher apprenticeship programs – which allow individuals to become licensed teachers for free while earning a wage through job-embedded training – could go a long way toward bridging the gap for many commonwealth school districts.

“The concern that I’ve heard from rural and small-school-district superintendents is that they don’t have enough qualified applicants for the roles that they post,” Adams said, who added that the apprenticeships open doors for staff already in the school community to make the leap toward teaching. “The apprenticeship model sort of removes those barriers and allows school systems to recruit talent from within in a way that principals and superintendents haven’t been able to do before.”

Citing Tennessee’s teacher apprenticeship program – the first state program of its kind – Adams said a similar program in Pennsylvania would allow individuals to “grow into the position” while still being paid and supervised by a teacher mentor.

“It’s almost like a four-year student-teacher role, where you’re gradually given more responsibility based on the skills that you’ve mastered,” Adams told City & State. “This allows the person who wants to step into a teacher role in a rural district to do so without having to quit their job.”

Pennsylvania’s apprenticeship program has grown in recent years under the Shapiro administration. In 2025, the state created a $4.2 million grant opportunity to expand the Certified Teacher Registered Apprenticeship, putting up an additional $7.76 million later in the year. As part of the grant process, local intermediate units and schools could receive up to $400,000 – or $600,000 for those serving more than one district – to expand existing earn-as-you-learn programs in education.

“This program is an innovative Pennsylvania solution to the teacher shortages affecting schools and students nationwide,” Labor and Industry Secretary Nancy A. Walker said at the time. “By combining on-the-job training with classroom instruction, we’re creating pathways to family-sustaining careers while helping our schools and students thrive.”

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Milk from oats and affordable coats: Pennsylvania lands 2 major corporations in 3 days

Harrison Cann — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 14:20:18 -0400

For the second time in three days, a national company announced major investments in Pennsylvania.

The two announcements – coming from yogurt giant Chobani and discount retailer Burlington – are expected to bring nearly 3,000 jobs to the commonwealth over the next five years.

In Philadelphia Thursday morning, Gov. Josh Shapiro and Mayor Cherelle Parker unveiled Burlington Stores Inc.’s plans to relocate its headquarters to the Schuylkill Yards complex in West Philadelphia. The move, which Shapiro called “the largest headquarters relocation to the city in years,” includes a $370 million investment from Burlington Stores, a $30 million state investment and a $7 million forgivable loan from the City of Philadelphia, according to government officials.

“The state is committing $30 million to this project, and we’re taking an all-hands-on-deck (approach) alongside the City of Philadelphia to continue to support the growth at Burlington and to support your workers for years to come,” Shapiro said Thursday.

The announcement comes barely two days after Shapiro was in the Lehigh Valley to share the news of a $1.2 billion investment by Chobani to create a dairy manufacturing facility – and 900 jobs in the process.

“We’ve worked with the private sector to create 29,000 new jobs and secured over $43 billion in economic growth – from a corporate headquarters like this to just two days ago in the Lehigh Valley, landing Chobani as their big new facility,” Shapiro added.

Burlington’s move is expected to create at least 2,000 new jobs over the next five years, officials said. Chobani’s expansion to Pennsylvania is the largest private-sector investment in the state’s agricultural history.

“Job creation is important, but we have to be creating the kind of jobs that will put people on a path to self-sufficiency – that will give Philadelphians the opportunity to become homeowners and to be able to take care of themselves with a sense of dignity and pride,” said Parker, who noted the average salary for the Burlington jobs is about $125,000 a year.

“It’s about more than those numbers: It’s about 2,000 people being ingrained and being a part of the fabric of our city,” Parker continued. “Two thousand people loving our restaurants, our coffee shops, our stores, and our small businesses, (and) 2,000 new people enjoying our neighborhoods, our cultural institutions and our world-class attractions.”

Chobani acquired a 1.5 million-square-foot facility in Lehigh County and is expected to create 900 full-time jobs over five years. When fully operational, officials said, the facility will process more than three billion pounds of Pennsylvania milk annually – nearly one-third of all milk currently produced in the commonwealth.

In the final stretch of his reelection campaign, Shapiro has repeatedly leaned on the state’s economy and private investment as a sign that the state is “open for business.”

“A big part of that is because of our hard-nosed competitive approach to economic development,” said Shapiro.

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PA farmers, plagued by bumper crop of crises, turn to legislators for help

Hilary Danailova — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 15:30:55 -0400

In his nearly quarter-century harvesting corn, soy and wheat in Fayette County, Mike Reskovac has rarely experienced the kind of sticker shock he felt buying fertilizer this year.

Nitrogen fertilizer, manufactured from the oil that has become a scarcer commodity during the U.S.-Iran war, increased from $500 to $700 per ton within the first weeks of the conflict. “And it didn’t stop there. I talked to a few farmers several weeks later, and it was close to $1,000 a ton,” recalled Reskovac, who has had to borrow more than $10,000 to meet the additional fertilizer costs that keep his 800-acre enterprise going. “It essentially doubled.”

Rising fertilizer costs haven’t been the only obstacle for Stacey Mullen at The Berry Farm and Orchard, the 40-acre pick-your-own fruit business she runs in Kutztown. In April, she lost nearly all her peach, apple and apricot crops due to a freakish spell of weather that sent temperatures into the 90s, then below freezing a few days later, causing prematurely ripening fruit to wither and blacken.

Statewide, fruit growers have reported losses of nearly 100% of key crops like apples, peaches and cherries due to the freeze. That amounts to $150 to $200 million in lost revenue for agritourism businesses like Mullen’s, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture.

Mike Reskovac, shown with this year’s corn crop, spent $15,000 more on fuel and fertilizer this year. Photo credit: Provided

“I’m out at farms every day,” said Mullen, who is also an agricultural consultant for a fertilizer company. “Some maybe will have a 40% crop, some have zero – but nobody has a full crop this year.”

Throw in the soaring price of diesel fuel – caused, like fertilizer inflation, by the Iran war – along with a severe labor shortage caused by the federal immigration crackdown, and it all adds up to a uniquely challenging year for the commonwealth’s farmers. While they cross their fingers for an end to the war – and a corresponding drop in next season’s fertilizer and fuel costs – their elected lawmakers, aided by the nation’s only state-level Farm Bill, are responding with policy proposals aimed at buoying the $133 billion agricultural sector through choppy economic waters.

“Whether you’re in the poultry industry or whether you’re in the fruit industry, we need to keep you in business,” explained state Rep. Dan Moul of Adams County, the Republican co-chair of the state House Agriculture & Rural Affairs Committee, of legislators’ guiding philosophy. “We can’t make you whole, right? We can’t give you a big profit. But we want to keep you alive.”

FERTILIZER IN FLUX

Many Americans only learned that oil is the raw material for most of the world’s fertilizer when the Iran war closed the Strait of Hormuz to oil export traffic – including 30% of the world’s fertilizer supply – this past spring. That bottleneck resulted in a winnowed global fertilizer supply that drove up the price worldwide, including in the U.S. – which, while far less dependent on Middle East oil than many countries, is nonetheless sensitive to the supply-and-demand fluctuations of global commodity markets.

To make matters worse, the fertilizer crunch hit squarely during the spring planting season – precisely the moment when farmers throughout Pennsylvania and the mid-Atlantic needed it most. “Fertilizer affects every farmer out there,” said Moul, pointing out how livestock farmers are affected: They feed their animals with the soy, corn and hay that pricier fertilizer has made more costly.

Chris Herr, the longtime president of PennAg Industries Association, told City & State that roughly 60% of the state’s farmers have reported cutting back on their fertilizer usage due to the price runup. That figure is lower than the 70% of farmers nationally who have reported limiting fertilizer – a disparity that reflects Pennsylvania’s unusually strong support for its agriculture sector – but it is still substantial enough to potentially impact yield. And, notes Herr, it is also an unsustainable strategy – it’s “not something you can do for years on end.”

Increased fertilizer costs are coinciding with this year’s relatively low prices for staple commodity crops like corn and soybeans, making it even harder for crop farmers to recoup their investment in raw materials. “So it’s a real big challenge – coupled again with high diesel costs, directly related to the same issues in the Middle East,” said Herr, “and has put farmers at the level where just maintaining is a real challenge.”

In Fayette County, Reskovac matter-of-factly tallied up this year’s additional costs to fertilize his crops, which also include pumpkins, sunflowers and hay. Thirty-five tons of urea fertilizer, which this year cost an additional $5,500. Fifty tons of liquid nitrogen: another $5,000 extra. “We probably spent $10,000 to $11,000 more than we needed to, just because of the war,” he said.

And that’s just fertilizer. Reskovac estimates he used 3,000 gallons of diesel fuel, which has increased by up to $2 per gallon.

How has he afforded this all? “We just borrowed more money,” he said, adding that he took loans from Horizon Farm Credit and the USDA’s Farm Service Agency. “We had to spend more money that wasn’t really in the budget.”

Moul’s Democratic co-chair, Luzerne County state Rep. Eddie Day Pashinski, expressed frustration over the man-made nature of the fertilizer crisis – one of several downstream effects of President Donald Trump’s decision to wage war on Iran, he said, adding that farmers were already suffering from higher prices on a variety of goods due to the administration’s tariffs.

“It’s disturbing to me that decisions were made which have now thrown us into this form of emergency-type situation, which we really didn’t need to be in,” Pashinski said.

He bemoaned an upward spiral of costs, in which higher fertilizer and diesel prices raise costs for farmers – “and then it costs us at the grocery store.”

INADVERTENTLY FROZEN FOODS

In contrast, the devastating April freeze was genuinely a natural disaster. At The Berry Farm and Orchard, Mullen said that at least it was theoretically possible to compensate for higher fertilizer costs by raising prices. With withered and blackened fruit, it’s simply a loss.

Such losses are particularly hard on small growers like her husband, whose sole income is derived from his few acres of peaches, apples and cherries. While this year’s state budget allocated $10 million in emergency aid to affected farmers through the Pennsylvania Farm Bill, Mullen thinks her business is likely too small to qualify – and has had to pivot to balance her budget.

She said The Berry Farm is compensating by doing “basically what a lot of other people are doing: We went bigger on cut-your-own flowers. We went bigger on vegetables,” including novelty items like purple green beans. Mullen has also started offering workshops on topics like growing berries in the backyard – “whatever extra stuff I could do to bring in income.”

April’s extreme weather caused $200 million in losses for growers of the state’s key fruit crops, including apples, peaches and cherries. Photo credit: Westend61/Getty Images

At Quarter Pine Tree Farm, a family Christmas-tree business in Smithfield, Beth Bossio is already looking past this year’s holiday season – and considering alternatives to the Douglas firs that are a Christmas mainstay.

While April’s freeze didn’t destroy her farm’s Douglas firs outright, it did affect their looks – and Christmas trees are all about appearance. “The new growth that came out on them was damaged from that freeze,” explained Bossio. “That growth is brown and not pretty.”

For next year, she is considering replacing Douglas crops with hardier conifers like the Turkish fir: “We are looking to see, if these extreme weather patterns continue to happen, what species can handle them?”

Chris Herr said the “million-dollar question” is whether farmers will see ongoing impact from this year’s crop damage. In addition to specialty crops like Christmas trees, later crops, like the fall grape harvest, may be affected – which, in turn, impacts the region’s wine industry, he added.

CULTIVATING SUPPORT

Both the fertilizer and fruit crises are on the radars of state lawmakers, who have moved swiftly to respond to farmers’ needs.

Pashinski and Moul praise the bipartisan cooperation that has facilitated efforts like the $10 million allocated in this year’s state budget to compensate fruit growers. Through the Pennsylvania Farm Bill, legislators used the same type of rapid-response funding mechanism as they recently did to shore up poultry farms during the avian influenza outbreak.

The General Assembly also passed a bill with bipartisan support regulating the use of so-called “food processing residuals” – byproducts of food production that, with their nutrient value, can be used as fertilizer. A sticking point had been the need to mitigate foul odors emitted by some residuals, which might come from dairy or vegetable processing facilities or meatpacking plants.

“The bottom line is that there’s been no legislature in America, and no administration in America, who has stepped up higher than what Pennsylvania has done over the last three or four years … financially on behalf of farmers,” said Herr, referring not only to the fruit and fertilizer responses but also to the efforts around bird flu.

A farmer works in a field in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Photo credit: Wale Oseni/Getty Images

Both Moul and Pashinski affirm the efficacy of their working relationship, and praise bipartisan support for the farming sector. “There’s a good rapport,” said Pashinski of the General Assembly, state Agriculture Secretary Russell Redding and U.S. Rep. Glenn “GT” Thompson, a Republican who chairs the U.S. House Committee on Agriculture.

At the state level, he said, “we have tried to be prepared for any number of problems that may occur … We’re very fortunate: We have a reserve fund of approximately $8 billion. So as a result, I think we do have money that might be available if there’s no federal aid … if we go through some kind of catastrophe. But I also think the feds have to come across and recognize what’s transpired. They have to play a role as well.”

For their part, federal officials say they are responding directly to this year’s exigencies – most notably with the $500 million Fertilizer Investment & Expansion for Long-Term Domestic Supply Program.

Administered through USDA Rural Development, the FIELDS program, as it is known, aims to bolster the fertilizer supply chain by subsidizing the construction of production facilities and, therefore, expanding domestic manufacturing capacity.

“While we don’t necessarily have 100% access to all of the nutrients that we need in the United States,” said a policy spokesperson for the U.S. House Agriculture Committee, “we do want to make sure that we have as much of that production capacity happening domestically as possible, so that we’re not going to be as impacted by some of this global volatility.”

The spokesperson also told City & State that the USDA recently hired its first-ever crop input economist to scrutinize the fertilizer marketplace, with an eye on potential price gouging. The agency is also collaborating with other federal departments to streamline permitting for energy products, which many legislators say could lower the price of fertilizer production.

That’s a solution favored by Moul, who said the price hike has been exacerbated by what he characterized as longtime burdensome regulations around fertilizer manufacturing, as well as environmental restrictions on energy production.

“Fertilizer started going through the roof – that way precedes the Iranian conflict,” he said. “The cost of obeying all the regulations that come with it, and now throw on top of it the cost of oil and the cost of all the other ingredients … Plus, now the cost of labor is just running through the roof.”

SHORING UP LABOR

Labor is a longtime challenge for Pennsylvania’s agriculture sector, which is dealing with an aging workforce and a dearth of younger people to replace them. Since the Trump administration cracked down on immigration last year, the situation has been exacerbated by a shortage of the foreign workers farms have come to rely on for a variety of jobs.

“So much of the (farm) work ... is done by H2A workers,” observed Herr, referring to the U.S. visa program for the temporary foreign laborers who pick fruit and process meat. “It’s mostly immigrant help, and they do a phenomenal job – and it’s got to be part of the national discussion.

“We rely on it for year-round labor,” he added. “It used to be that it was just seasonal, but because of the need in the poultry industry and the swine industry and the dairy industry – you know, Pennsylvania is the fourth-largest egg producer in the country – we really need a year-round solution.”

The H-2A visa program … no longer meets the needs of American agricultural production.

– U.S. Rep. Glenn “GT” Thompson

In late June, Thompson – a longtime crusader on this issue – introduced the bipartisan Securing Agriculture’s Workforce Act to reform the H2A program, expanding access to year-round foreign labor. The bill also proposes streamlining the paperwork around immigrant hiring, which many complain has become overly burdensome for employers and has led to costly delays in farm staffing.

“Producers have been sounding the alarm for years that Congress needs to address the workforce crisis we have on our hands in farm country,” Thompson said in a statement announcing the legislation. “The H-2A visa program is woefully outdated, and it no longer meets the needs of American agricultural production.”

After what he calls “two bad years” of poorly timed droughts, Reskovac has gotten used to coping with adversity. Going into the 2026 planting season, he’d saved $20,000 by switching both his seed mix and the farm’s crop insurance premiums. “But now we have $15,000 more that we had to spend between fertilizer and fuel,” he reflected. “So at the end of the day, we’ve spent about the same amount of money that we did last year.”

Still, as farmers like to say, it’s a profession that relies on optimism – the eternal belief that this season will be better than last. “Luckily, this year we’ve been getting some pretty timely rain … The crop looks fairly good at the moment,” Reskovac noted. “Which I know, at any point, can change.”

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Shapiro administration announces wage theft protection for home health care workers

Harrison Cann — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 14:47:04 -0400

Gov. Josh Shapiro’s administration wants to be more proactive in cracking down on wage theft – particularly in the home health care industry.

Labor and Industry Secretary Nancy Walker held a press conference in Philadelphia Wednesday to announce what officials called a “strategic labor law enforcement initiative” to protect home care workers from providers who break state wage laws.

The “Standing Up for Home Care Workers Enforcement Initiative” – a collaboration between the state departments of Labor & Industry, Human Services and Aging – seeks to proactively audit and investigate providers for potential wage theft, rather than wait until a complaint is filed with state officials.

“We are utilizing the combined power of state government to ensure that home care workers are afforded the dignity and the respect that they deserve,” Walker said at SEIU Local 1201 Wednesday morning. “We will not wait for new complaints, but we will be proactive and strategic in an industry where people are often isolated, where they’re often underpaid, and where they fear if they speak up they’ll be retaliated against.”

Walker said that nearly 40% of the minimum wage act complaints L&I receives come from the home care industry, and that many workers aren’t compensated for overtime pay when they work beyond 40 hours a week.

Flanked by labor leaders and state officials at the announcement, home care workers and their advocates keyed on the essential nature of this workforce, especially during a time when the commonwealth’s population is aging: By 2030, 1 in 3 Pennsylvanians will be over the age of 60.

Theo Braddy, executive director of the National Council on Independent Living, stressed that home care workers “perform some of the most important work in our commonwealth.”

“They help all adults (and) people with disabilities get out of bed, get dressed, eat, go to work – participate in their community,” said Braddy, who has dealt with a disability since he broke his neck playing high school football. “Wage theft should not be tolerated. And we cannot talk about addressing Pennsylvania’s home care worker shortage while allowing workers to go unpaid.”

The commonwealth’s aging population – and potential Medicaid cuts – further complicate an already dire situation for the home care industry. As of last year, more than 400,000 Pennsylvanians relied on in-home care services, and industry leaders say the state is already stretched for in-home care providers, with more than 112,000 direct-care shifts going unfilled in the state each month.

“We support holding bad actors accountable, but they should not define an industry overwhelmingly made up of providers committed to their workers and the people they serve,” Mia Haney, CEO of the Pennsylvania Homecare Association, said in a statement. “The reality is that agencies agree with the administration’s comments that we have to pay workers more … Strong enforcement protects workers from employers who break the law. Adequate Medicaid funding gives responsible employers the resources to raise wages and strengthen the workforce.”

Marshene Ellis, a home care agency worker for more than 17 years, said many home care workers are the only person their client sees on a given day.

“We help them do things they can’t do anymore. We help them keep themselves going,” Ellis said at the press conference.

“The hard part is, the workers doing this care are not always treated the way we should be. I’ve worked for different agencies and seen the broken promises and low wages,” she continued. “It’s sad to say, but my kids can make more money than I do in an hour.”

Following the press conference, Walker told City & State the goal of the initiative is to take “the bull by the horns on this.”

“We’re strategically sending out our demands for wage and hour information to home care agencies across the commonwealth – so that when we get that information, we can start doing audits everywhere,” Walker told City & State. “We don’t have to depend on folks that are intimidated or afraid to speak out, or just simply don’t understand their rights in doing so.”

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Exclusive: Gov. Josh Shapiro picks up endorsements from 5 law enforcement unions

Justin Sweitzer — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 11:00:00 -0400

Just days after receiving endorsements from the Pennsylvania State Troopers Association and Philadelphia’s Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 5, Gov. Josh Shapiro picked up endorsements from five additional police unions on Wednesday as he continues to build support from law enforcement heading into November’s gubernatorial election.

The Shapiro campaign announced endorsements from the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 11 in Chester County and William Penn Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 19 in the City of Chester, as well as Delaware County’s Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 27. Also backing Shapiro is the Fraternal Order of Transit Police Lodge 109, which represents SEPTA police officers, and the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 92 Labor Services, which represents investigation and inspection professionals.

“I’m proud to stand with the men and women who serve this Commonwealth every day – and I am honored to receive the support of FOP Lodges 11, 19, 27, 92, and 109,” Shapiro said Wednesday in a statement.

“As long as I am Governor, I will always fight for the brave law enforcement officers who protect and serve our fellow Pennsylvanians – and we are going to continue working together to ensure they have the resources and support they need to keep our communities safe all across this Commonwealth,” he added.

Police union leaders highlighted Shapiro’s support for law enforcement – and his record – as major factors behind their support. They pointed to a cost-of-living adjustment for state pensioners in this year’s budget as a major win for their members, and praised the governor for supporting their respective unions during recent contract negotiations.

Robert F. McCarron, president of FOP Lodge 11 in Chester County, said Shapiro has “demonstrated an unwavering commitment to law enforcement, public safety, and the rule of law.”“Under his leadership, he has worked to ensure that officer wages, benefits, and pension protections remain secure,” McCarron added. “His Administration has shown a clear understanding of the sacrifices made by those who serve in law enforcement and the importance of providing them with the support and resources necessary to perform their duties effectively.”

Christopher D. Eiserman, the president of FOP Lodge 27 in Delaware County, said in a statement of his own that the governor “has worked collaboratively with officers, labor organizations, and community leaders to promote policies that strengthen public safety while supporting those who wear the badge.”

“We believe he is the right leader for Pennsylvania, and we look forward to continuing our partnership with an administration that values and respects the men and women of law enforcement,” Eiserman added.

Omari J. Bervine, the president of the Fraternal Order of Transit Police Lodge 109, said Shapiro’s direct involvement in contract negotiations helped end – and avert – strikes in Philadelphia, including the threat of a strike this summer.

“Our members are grateful for your willingness, and that of your team, to intervene directly in our contract negotiations not once, but twice,” Bervine said in a statement. “Your engagement helped end one strike and prevent another, ensuring the 200+ members of the SEPTA Transit Police Department could continue protecting passengers while patrolling one of the country’s largest transportation systems during this historic and crucially important period for Philadelphia.”

“You have shown yourself to be more than a politician who simply claims to support law enforcement,” Bervine added. “You’ve demonstrated that support through action, by getting in the game and stepping up to the plate rather than watching from the sidelines.”

Throughout his first term in office, Shapiro has regularly advocated for increased state funding to fund new Pennsylvania State Police cadet classes. Over the course of the last four years, Shapiro has secured funding for 16 new cadet classes, which will train more than 1,600 new state troopers; this year’s state budget included $16.2 million to train four new cadet classes. His administration has also distributed more than $1 billion through community violence prevention grants.

Shapiro is facing Treasurer Stacy Garrity, the Republican Party nominee, in this year’s race for governor.

Publicly available polling in the race shows Shapiro with a lead over Garrity in the gubernatorial race. A poll released in early August by National Public Affairs Polling, a GOP polling firm, had Shapiro pulling in support from 50% of likely voters and Garrity notching 43%. Of those surveyed, 7% said they were undecided.

A Franklin & Marshall College poll released in late August showed Shapiro with a 25-point lead in the race for governor, with Shapiro leading Garrity 50% to 25%.

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PA measles outbreak continues to roil pols, policymakers, physicians

Hilary Danailova — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 23:53:55 -0400

At the beginning of last week, the story of Pennsylvania’s measles outbreak was primarily of statewide concern. But since the state’s report of its first two deaths from the virus, the outbreak has gone viral nationally, metastasizing into a partisan controversy over whether measles actually caused the Lancaster County deaths – and casting a harsh spotlight on Gov. Josh Shapiro, whose administration has come under fire for what is being perceived by some as a lack of transparency.

Over the weekend, the social media site X buzzed with commentary on the measles deaths from doctors and public health experts around the country, many of whom speculated over the higher-profile case: a newborn who died of what was diagnosed as a “lacerated spleen” and who tested positive for the contagious virus. Every major American newspaper carried the story of Pennsylvania’s measles outbreak – with nearly 500 cases reported so far – and the controversy it has engendered; The Atlantic, a national magazine, garnered attention for its interview with the family of the dead newborn.

Meanwhile, Dr. Stephen Diamantoni, the Lancaster County coroner at the center of the controversy, has refused to attribute the baby’s death to measles and maintains that his office has yet to certify a single measles death in the county. The board-certified family physician told Lancaster Online that “we want to determine the cause of the laceration. And we may not be able to,” adding that as of Tuesday, he was also investigating a second case of a Lancaster resident who had died while positive for measles.

In a Sunday op-ed in The New York Times, “How Not To Announce A Measles Death,” physician and contributing opinion writer Dr. Rachael Bedard criticized not the state’s medical determination around the measles patients’ causes of death, but its communication strategy. “The stakes of this moment – measles transmission is high, confidence in government and public health is low – require a standard of engagement, clarity and transparency that the initial Pennsylvania response failed to meet,” she wrote, citing the governor’s failure to provide basic details around both victims.

In a widely circulated Substack column promoted on X, Dr. Paul Offit, the co-director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a longtime critic of Kennedy’s medical pronouncements, noted that “Dr. Diamantoni is in a tough spot. He is dealing with an unusual case.

“So, it’s easy to understand his caution in assigning a cause,” wrote Offit. But he noted that the coroner’s public statements had shifted from “measles was not the cause of death” to the virus being a “contributing factor,” exacerbating the confusion around a highly politicized case.

“Although the press and public have grown increasingly frustrated with Governor Shapiro and the Pennsylvania Department of Health for failing to make the cause of this child’s death clear, the confusion lies with Dr. Diamontoni,” Offit wrote. “If Dr. Diamantoni is going to claim that measles wasn’t the precipitating cause of this child’s death, he is going to have to do a much better job of explaining why it wasn’t.”

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A Q&A with U.S. Rep. Scott Perry

Justin Sweitzer — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 09:00:00 -0400

U.S. Rep. Scott Perry has made a name for himself as one of the most vocal conservatives in Congress. The former chair of the House Freedom Caucus and a longtime election-denier, Perry can still be found at the center of a number of political flashpoints.

He’s been an outspoken critic of Flock cameras, has pushed for legislation that would ban members of Congress from trading stocks, and is gearing up to once again face Janelle Stelson, a former news anchor who secured the Democratic nomination in Pennsylvania’s 10th Congressional District, in November. Perry recently spoke with City & State about his top priorities in Congress, as well as what Republicans need to do to succeed in the midterms.

The following conversation has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

You’ve been publicly expressing concerns with Flock cameras. What are your chief concerns with them?

Most people are unaware of them. It’s warrantless surveillance by almost anybody. If you’ve got the money and the connection, you can purchase the data, and I don’t think that most people are aware of how prolific the cameras are and that they’re being surveilled. There’s really almost no policy regarding the use of that information for legitimate purposes, by legitimate organizations or individuals or otherwise – including United States adversaries like China or Russia or North Korea or hackers from Iran. There’s literally nothing that prevents almost anybody on the planet from having and utilizing this information in whatever way they want to. That’s the concern. It does have a legitimate law enforcement component, but there has to be a balance because we are all protected by the Constitution. But the Constitution doesn’t jump out of the frame and run to your aid; somebody has to use it to protect themselves. Again, if you’re not even aware that your rights are being violated, you don’t know that you need the protection.

You sponsored an amendment regarding Flock use on federal highways. What can be done at the congressional level to allay privacy concerns – while also allowing law enforcement to use that tool?

I think the first thing to do is have a conversation with concerned and interested parties, including law enforcement, which is what we’ve endeavored to do because we do want to make sure that we strike that balance. We think it is an important and useful technology; we want to see it used in the correct way, not used for nefarious purposes. The first thing is to have a conversation and understand the viewpoints of all the stakeholders – and then see where you can go from there. As a federal legislator, you want to make sure that abuses aren’t taking place, but that utilization for legitimate purposes is also a reality

The other thing is to raise awareness for citizens, and state and local lawmakers. The advent of these things and the proliferation of them is relatively new – within the last couple years. Most citizens just aren’t even aware. That’s part of the conversation – just making sure that people are aware of their surroundings and what’s happening.

You recently voted in support of a congressional stock trading ban. What is your take on this issue?

I have been the prime sponsor, co-sponsor, original co-sponsor of numerous of these types of bills, most of them bipartisan; this is the latest iteration. Just like almost anything else, there’s always somebody that abuses the goodwill of the organization, of the people.

People run for office because they say they want to serve, but the reality is, in some cases, they’re serving themselves. Most people don’t start a job where they can get information that other people don’t get, where they’re making a decent salary, but not becoming wealthy.

Statistically, the numbers show that some of these people with access to information outperform everybody else, including people who watch markets and do financial advice for a living. I like to say that serving isn’t about what you can get; it’s about what you can give. If you want to go make millions of dollars in the stock market, well, God bless you – do that for a living. But if you’re trying to do that at the same time you’re supposed to be looking out for the well-being of your constituents – your bosses – it sure doesn’t look that way when you’re getting rich and they’re not.

Speaking of insider trading, that’s also becoming an issue with prediction markets. Do you think that’s something that needs to be curbed through legislation?

We live in America, and people are generally supposed to be free to do what they want to do. But when you agree to serve, when you take on one of these roles as a servant, I think that there’s a sacrifice that comes with service. And if you’re not willing to do that, then you should do something else. I think that as time goes on, we’re probably going to have to address those issues in the same way that we considered insider trading and the stock ban for members of the legislature.

Perry has championed efforts to ban congressional stock trading in the United States. Photo credit: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

All that kind of activity has a corrosive effect on the trust that people have in institutions. That’s not sustainable, and it is not healthy. It’s not everybody that does this, but there always seems to be someone that abuses it – and so, because of that, then you’re forced to take action.

What else is at the top of your agenda?

Our energy prices are way too high. Some of it is market-based, but a lot of it is policy-based, where we choose to force our consumers – our citizens – to buy the least efficient, most expensive power on the planet. This is not something that just showed up. This has been going on for some time in Pennsylvania. In the last 11 years, we’ve shut down nearly five gigawatts of baseload power that is traditionally fueled, and the cost of that is reflected in everybody’s bills. People have a hard time making all this stuff add up to their paychecks. So the cost of energy is something that I have worked on continuously this session.

The cost of healthcare probably will be an issue in this campaign. One of my frustrations is that the folks that actually caused the problem are going to blame the problem on the folks that had nothing to do with it. That’s particularly the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare. Prices have gone up fantastically since that legislation has been enshrined in law. People can’t afford it. There are long wait times, and somehow the Democrat Party now seeks to blame the Republican Party for what they did – and not one Republican voted for it.

Another focus is just privacy in general regarding the federal government. The fact that we cannot get the Senate to agree to put a ban on a central bank digital currency concerns me. When you tie that with artificial intelligence, gait analysis, facial recognition software, automatic license plate readers like Flock – and then put the power of the federal government to determine what you buy and if you’re allowed to buy it – those are things that, to me, are of great concern. We want to make sure that everybody’s constitutional rights are upheld and respected.

The midterms can be challenging for the party that controls the White House and Congress. What do you think Republicans need to do to avoid losing seats?

Well, whether you’re Republican or Democrat, the job is to go out and earn it every day, and not act like just because you’re there, you’re somehow anointed to be there. You have to show your bosses – the people that you’re working for – that you’re working for them, that your focus is on them, that your service is to them and is respectful of them. They know that you’re not going to agree on every single thing. I’ve got 760,000 bosses that span from the rural farmlands of central Cumberland, York, and northern Dauphin County to the city of Harrisburg and the city of York and Carlisle. You’re not going to be able to please everybody on every single occasion, but you’ve got to be respectful of their viewpoints and show them that you hear them, and that you’re trying to improve their lot in life. That means sometimes standing against your own party when necessary. I don’t think there’s one representative in Pennsylvania that – on either side of the aisle – can claim that more than I can.

Perry, left, watches as U.S. Rep James Comer speaks to the media. Photo credit: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

I think we have to inspire our voters, regardless of where they are politically. Especially now, where it’s a choice between normal and absolutely crazy. When you look at the so-called Democrat Socialists that have taken over what used to be the Democrat Party – they want to get rid of prisons, they want to get rid of the police. They literally say that. It’s not me saying that. They say that they want to get rid of the United States Senate. They want a wide-open border. Most people just want to live in a world that’s normal, where their girls shower and play sports with other girls, where the criminals go to jail instead of getting access to your home, and then you’re questioned for trying to defend yourself. I think that Republicans in general need to remind everybody how crazy the Democrat Party has now become. It’s been taken over by these absolutely radical viewpoints that are antithetical to the American way of life. But it’s up to us to make that case.

When talking with PA-10 constituents, what are you hearing as their major concerns?

No matter what, everybody wants the government to be accountable. One of the things I hear is that all these things happened in the past administration, and no one’s really been held accountable. Voters are frustrated with that. The other thing I hear is: Does my vote matter at all with this ubiquitous mail-in ballot system where we send out thousands upon tens of thousands of ballots that are untracked, unknown? We don’t verify citizenship. We don’t verify whether you’re a resident. We don’t even verify whether you’re alive. And does my vote even matter? We used to be able to know the night of or, at the latest, the next day if somebody won an election. Now it takes maybe weeks to know. This is the 21st century; it seems like we’re headed in the wrong direction.

We all buy things and have to pay our bills; people are frustrated that costs continue to go up – and they want some relief. Even as the economy is doing much better than it did, even as lower-wage jobs are increasing in wages, and even as people’s retirement incomes increase through their 401(k) or their stock portfolio – they still demand lower prices. I certainly understand that; I’m paying the same prices, too. On all those fronts, I have answers to those folks. Some things I can do something about and I fight on, and some things I fight on but I don’t have as much horsepower. On things like voting, the states decide a whole lot of that, per the Constitution. Where we can, we have threaded the needle on the SAVE America Act. But again, while I have voted for it multiple times, the United States Senate seems reluctant to – and I’m not a United States senator, so all I can do is put it strategically in the best position for them to do that, and to urge them to do that. The point is to hear everybody’s concerns and to explain what you’ve done to address them.

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The City & State Who's Who in Labor 2026

Hilary Danailova — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 09:45:00 -0400

Pennsylvania's labor scene spans longstanding unions, litigators remaking labor law, classrooms educating a diverse new generation of skilled tradespeople, and a workforce building the commonwealth's new clean-energy economy. That outsized political clout is evident across City & State PA’s Who's Who in Labor 2026 – a list of the state's most essential workers championing work.

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As PA measles outbreak intensifies, so does the political polarization around it

Hilary Danailova — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 17:57:30 -0400

Pennsylvania’s first major measles outbreak in 35 years exploded into a political firestorm this week, with social-media controversy over the state’s two recorded measles deaths dividing leaders from the political, health and business communities – largely along party lines.

At the center of the current debate is whether the two official measles victims actually died of the highly contagious virus, which has sickened at least 460 unvaccinated Pennsylvanians since the outbreak began in Lancaster County in April; it has since spread to 30 other counties.

The controversy flared up on Wednesday, just after Gov. Josh Shapiro announced a broadening of the state’s measles response to curb the widening outbreak, when he and U.S. Health & Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. traded accusations in a heated exchange on the social media site X.

Shapiro slammed the federal health czar – a lawyer with a decades-long record of anti-vaccine activism – for “inaccurate and misleading” statements about measles and the MMR vaccine, which prevents it. For his part, Kennedy accused the governor of “gaslighting” residents and Shapiro’s staff of “fabricating” the two official “measles-associated” deaths, which state Secretary of Health Debra Bogen reported on Tuesday.

Also on Wednesday, Lancaster County Commission Vice-Chair Josh Parsons, a Republican, wrote the first of what have become dozens of X posts pushing back against the assertion that his county’s residents died of measles. “They currently have zero measles deaths in Lancaster County. They have one death of a person who died WITH measles, but not from measles,” he wrote on Aug. 26, calling for “transparency” from the governor’s administration. “So as of right now, we have ZERO information that corroborates the idea that there were two measles deaths in Lancaster County.”

But on Friday, Stephanie Nojiri, a spokesperson for the state Department of Health, affirmed its position that measles caused the two reported deaths. “Every measles case, hospitalization and death is thoroughly reviewed to confirm it meets the CDC’s case definition,” Nojiri told City & State. “PA DOH uses the term ‘measles-associated’ when laboratory or epidemiologic evidence of measles is present, but the disease may not be assessed by the medical certifier or coroner to be the immediate cause of death. “It is vital to note that for communicable diseases, the infection itself is not always listed as the immediate cause of death and may instead be listed as an underlying or contributing factor. For example, if someone tested positive for tuberculosis (TB) and died from complications of TB, like pneumonia, the immediate cause of death will likely be listed as respiratory failure, but TB would be listed as an underlying or contributing factor.”

Neither of the two victims has been publicly identified. Much of the controversy centers around one of them, a newborn male – too young to be vaccinated – who reportedly died from a “lacerated spleen” and tested positive for measles; inflammation of the spleen, which can lead to rupture, is a known potential complication of measles, which is often more severe in young infants.

“As a pediatrician with more than 30 years of caring for children, I have thoroughly reviewed the case investigation information and sadly can confirm that there were two recent measles-associated deaths in Lancaster County, which were reported to the CDC’s measles response team early Tuesday morning,” Dr. Bogen wrote in a Wednesday post on X from the Department of Health account. “DOH’s Epidemiology team thoroughly investigated and verified both individuals tested positive for measles.”

Parsons’ fellow Lancaster commissioner, Democrat and former critical-care nurse Alice Yoder, waded into the debate as well, writing in a Wednesday post on Facebook that “my colleague, Commissioner Parsons, is intentionally sowing misinformation and doubt in a trusted public health agency. This is dangerous.”

Conservative backlash

Within hours of the Shapiro-Kennedy spat, conservative voices were contesting the state’s report, arguing that a “birth injury,” rather than measles, was likely the cause of the baby’s death. Among the skeptics is Lancaster County’s elected coroner, Dr. Stephen Diamantoni, a Republican and a family physician, who said on Tuesday that “no measles deaths were handled by our office” and that the investigation was ongoing.

But the pushback was hardly confined to either the commonwealth – on X, doctors from across the U.S. weighed in on the controversy – or the medical establishment.

“People who died from other causes tested positive for measles, although the measles did not kill them,” posted the PA Manufacturers’ Association, a pro-business group, on Wednesday in response to the DOH post.

On Thursday afternoon in Lancaster County, conservative activist Scott Presler posted on X: “In response to Governor Shapiro lying about the Measles deaths, I will be at the Green Dragon Farmers Market tomorrow…Leave the Amish alone,” he added, in a reference to the religious communities at the center of the outbreak.

In a Friday press release, state Treasurer Stacy Garrity – Shapiro’s Republican rival in this fall’s gubernatorial election – denounced what she called Shapiro’s “highly staged partisan press conference” and what conservatives view as a lack of transparency around the reported deaths. “There are still more questions than answers, largely because Josh Shapiro refuses to share the relevant information,” she said in the statement.

Many conservatives raised the specter of unpopular COVID-19-era public health mandates to criticize Shapiro, a Democrat, and tie him to the pandemic-era administration of former President Joe Biden. “Josh Shapiro recently proposed public health mandates that would make draconian COVID-era restrictions blush,” Garrity wrote, referring to the state Health Department’s first-in-decades proposed overhaul of public health protocols.

And Kennedy, in criticizing Shapiro’s “giddy delight in announcing two measles deaths,” called the governor’s Wednesday press conference “a replay of the Democrats' COVID playbook: fearmongering, misinformation, finger-pointing, and the weaponization of infectious disease fears for political gain.”

Fear among the farms

Those fears are an everyday reality for Lancaster’s busy agricultural sector, as was made clear in a Friday Zoom call hosted by PennAg, an agribusiness industry group, together with Bogen and state Agriculture Secretary Russell Redding.

“I’m not going to get caught up in the political craziness … This isn’t blue or red. I just want to figure out how to keep my farmers healthy and safe, and my employees healthy and safe,” Chris Pierce, the co-owner of Heritage Poultry Management Services, told the state officials.

Agriculture involves a complex supply and delivery chain, making the industry particularly vulnerable to communicable disease. Pierce said that for months now, the specter of measles – which can incubate for up to three weeks – has been a daily challenge as his team regularly comes into close contact with a variety of service providers, including more than 100 poultry farms, feed trucks and egg pickup drivers. “I don’t know what their employees are and the exposure – what risk it would cause to them,” he said.

In responding, both Redding and Bogen sought to lower the temperature of what has become a high-voltage debate in Lancaster – “being helpful here, not with the drama but with the facts, to make sure that folks understand the seriousness of this,” Redding said, adding that the department plans to raise awareness of measles at January’s annual Pennsylvania Farm Show.

Dr. Jennifer Wallace, the medical director of the state Department of Health’s Bureau of Community Health Systems, reassured farmers that measles is “strictly a human-to-human disease.

“In agriculture … you worry about not only, obviously, your workers, but you also worry about your product,” she said. “And here’s the good news: Unlike with some other infectious diseases, measles is not going to be spread by the eggs raised by the farmer who has measles.

But among people, she warned, “measles is one of the most highly contagious diseases known to mankind.” Wallace outlined the commonwealth’s more aggressive response to the outbreak, including home visits for those wishing to be tested or immunized for measles and updated MMR vaccination protocols.

Going forward, she said, infants can get a first dose of the vaccine at six months of age – a half-year earlier than the standard protocol – and the second and final dose of the series at 2 years of age, rather than at ages 4 or 5, the common age for school-compliant immunization.

Wallace said the department is reaching out to newly diagnosed patients to perform contact tracing and, where appropriate, treat contacts prophylactically. Unvaccinated people can be protected by receiving the MMR vaccine within 72 hours of an initial exposure; for people who remain unvaccinated, those at risk of severe disease, including the elderly or infants, can receive a temporary protective treatment known as measles immunoglobulin within six days of exposure.

While the officials declined to address the controversy over Lancaster’s measles-associated deaths, Wallace did provide an overview of the virus’ frightening potential complications – including pneumonia – “we’ve seen a bunch of cases of that here in Pennsylvania” – and encephalitis. “Typically younger children who get measles, they will fully recover. And then five to 10 years later, they suddenly get a headache, end up with encephalitis, and die within 48 hours. Scariest thing ever as a parent,” Wallace said. “It is a rare complication, but it does happen … So go ahead and get those kids vaccinated.

“And if you get a call from us, please answer our calls. We have a lot of people that don’t because they’re just afraid – ‘it’s the government, you know, why are they barging in on my private stuff?’” she added, nodding to the politicization around public health. “But it is really important because when we call you, it usually is because we know you’ve had an exposure or we’ve heard that you may be sick. And we can help keep your family safe.”

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Flock blockers: 5 proposals seeking to regulate Flock cameras and ALPRs in Pennsylvania

Justin Sweitzer — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 15:19:39 -0400

The use of Flock cameras and automated license plate readers, or ALPRs, has quickly become one of the most divisive issues in American politics. What started as a useful tool for law enforcement has become a national political flashpoint over privacy and surveillance concerns that have united Democrats and Republicans alike.

With more than 120,000 Flock cameras installed across the country, and an estimated 1,700 ALPRs in Pennsylvania, the technology has deeply unsettled Americans amid reports of law enforcement officers and others using the technology to stalk and surveil everyday people. According to an August survey by YouGov, Americans are largely split over whether they would support the installation of license plate cameras in their community: When asked about whether they would want an ALPR on the street where they live, 44% said they would oppose an ALPR on their street, compared to 40% who would support such an installation.

While Flock Safety, the company behind one of the most widely used ALPR brands, has made internal changes to curb misuse of its cameras, Pennsylvania state lawmakers believe new laws are needed to prevent ALPR abuse.

In recent weeks, state lawmakers have signaled a desire to regulate ALPRs in a variety of ways, from banning their use entirely to setting parameters for how and when they can be used. Below, City & State examines some of the latest proposals introduced by members of the General Assembly seeking to regulate Flock cameras and ALPRs.

Prohibiting Flock cameras and ALPRs in Pennsylvania

Republican state Sen. Dan Laughlin recently sent a co-sponsorship memo to colleagues outlining his plan to introduce legislation prohibiting the use of ALPRs connected to a network that automatically identifies and stores vehicle information. His bill would not prohibit the use of ordinary security cameras or vehicle-mounted license plate readers.

“The concern is not simply the camera. It is the creation of a searchable network capable of tracking and reconstructing a person’s movements over time,” Laughlin’s memo reads. “The overwhelming majority of individuals captured by these systems are not suspected of any crime. Yet their movements can still be recorded and stored, potentially revealing where they work, worship, seek medical care, spend their time and who they associate with,” Laughlin wrote. “That is a level of surveillance that should concern everyone.”

Moratoriums and safeguards for ALPRs

State Reps. David Rowe and Josh Bashline, both Republican lawmakers in the state House, plan to introduce a two-bill package aiming to protect Fourth Amendment rights from ALPRs, facial recognition systems and other new technologies. “Without clear guardrails, these emerging technologies could transform limited investigative tools into an Orwellian system of mass surveillance,” their co-sponsorship memo reads.

The first bill in the package would require government entities to obtain a warrant before using ALPRs to search for or track a specific person or license plate, while also limiting the retention of ALPR data to the “shortest period reasonably necessary.” The bill would also require ALPRs to be clearly identified via signage similar to existing automated speed-enforcement systems. The second bill in the package would allow local governments to adopt moratoriums on the installation and use of ALPRs within municipal boundaries.

Prohibiting the use of ALPRs for ‘routine, suspicionless collection’ of motorists’ movements

Doug Mastriano is another GOP state senator who plans to introduce a bill to regulate ALPRs and Flock cameras. According to a memo he sent to his Senate colleagues, Mastriano’s forthcoming legislation would “prohibit the mass, suspicionless collection and retention of Pennsylvanians’ movements” by ALPR systems. Mastriano’s proposal would prohibit using ALPR technology as a “general purpose system” for continuously collecting information about a motorist’s movements or travels, and establish penalties for intentionally using ALPR technology to stalk, harass, intimidate or improperly monitor another person.

According to the co-sponsorship memo, Mastriano’s bill will give law enforcement the ability to use ALPRs for specific public safety-related uses, including for investigations into stolen vehicles; AMBER Alert and missing person cases; investigations into a wanted or dangerous individual; and to find and identify vehicles related to a criminal investigation. “Police should investigate people when there is a legitimate reason to suspect wrongdoing,” Mastriano wrote. “Government should not surveil everyone in hopes of finding wrongdoing. That distinction will be at the heart of my legislation.”

Setting parameters on the use of ALPRs and ALPR data

Democratic state Rep. Tarik Khan introduced a proposal to regulate ALPRs by setting parameters on who can use ALPR data and how long it can be stored, along with establishing transparency requirements. The legislation would also create civil penalties for those who misuse data from Flock cameras and other ALPRs, and give the Pennsylvania attorney general and local district attorneys the ability to investigate violations and bring civil enforcement actions.

“We have to make sure that there are clear guardrails in place so that people’s rights are not being violated – that people are not being spied on and surveilled,” Khan told City & State in an interview. Khan’s bill has bipartisan support – one cosponsor is GOP state Rep. Robert Leadbeter, the chair of the Pennsylvania Freedom Caucus. Khan said that concern around the misuse of ALPRs is adding fuel to the public’s existing concerns about a “rapid expansion of tech without clear guardrails.”

Banning the unauthorized use of ALPRs and automated surveillance systems

In the Senate, Democratic state Sen. Lisa Boscola has also circulated a co-sponsorship memo for legislation that would ban knowingly using an ALPR or Flock camera for personal, unauthorized and unlawful purposes. Boscola cited a recent Washington Post report that found that, across the nation, at least 50 law enforcement officers have been charged or accused of misusing ALPRs to stalk or surveil people. “The same capabilities that make these systems valuable to law enforcement also create opportunities for serious individual misuse,” Boscola wrote. Under Boscola’s proposal, use of ALPRs for criminal investigations, missing-person cases, court-authorized uses and other legitimate public-safety purposes would not be prohibited.

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This week’s biggest Winners & Losers

City & State — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 16:28:55 -0400

Apparently, what happens in Vegas doesn’t always stay there. The masked man accused of terrorizing more than a dozen Philadelphians in August was arrested in his residence in Las Vegas. Authorities tracked down 22-year-old Zymire Hughes in Sin City after he had allegedly made threats and chased at least 15 people while wearing a Chucky-style Halloween mask near Philadelphia City Hall on August 12. Clearly, the case was child’s play for investigators.

Keep reading for more winners and losers!

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X marks the spat: Shapiro, RFK Jr. needle each other online over measles outbreak

Hilary Danailova — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 20:50:16 -0400

Gov. Josh Shapiro and Pennsylvania health officials today pushed back against claims by U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that the vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella, known as MMR, contains fetal tissue along with “human cellular debris.”

The two officials’ public dustup amid Pennsylvania’s worst measles outbreak in decades, which left two unvaccinated people dead this week, played out in a series of posts on the social media site X, with Kennedy accusing the governor of “gaslighting” and Shapiro calling Kennedy’s claims “inaccurate and misleading.”

Later on Wednesday, Kennedy went even further, questioning in another X post whether the measles deaths “may even have been altogether fabricated by one of the Governor's hopeful staffers” and amplifying spurious suggestions from some Lancaster County officials that the reported measles victims did not actually die of the disease.

The kerfuffle began when Kennedy called Shapiro to ask whether the commonwealth needed additional support from the federal government in responding to the Lancaster County-centered measles outbreak, which began in April and thus far involves 412 reported cases, one-third of them children – 94 of which were recorded in the last week alone, all in unvaccinated people.

The governor responded that Pennsylvania’s health establishment had the resources it needs: Nearly 100 pop-up clinics have immunized some 4,100 Pennsylvanians during the outbreak, with dozens more clinics planned amid a broadening of the state’s anti-measles effort announced by Shapiro this week.

Instead, Shapiro urged Kennedy – an environmental lawyer with a long history of anti-vaccine activism – to use his platform to encourage more vaccination against the highly contagious virus, which causes life-threatening complications in 20 percent of patients.

“He then launched into a tirade – talking about fetal tissue and blaming the previous Administration for this problem. He even told me it would be better if we went back to ‘natural measles,’” wrote the governor on X about Kennedy, who in 2021 told a Lancaster County audience that “the cure for measles is chicken soup and vitamin A.”

“Unfortunately at a time where I needed the top ‘health expert’ in the nation to responsibly work with us to deal with this outbreak,” added Shapiro in a post he later updated, “he instead chose to go down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories and false claims.”

Kennedy blasted back with a series of posts that began with a seemingly doctored photo collage of Dr. Stanley Plotkin, a world-renowned virologist, emeritus professor at the University of Pennsylvania and inventor of the rubella vaccine. The post shows Plotkin’s face superimposed against a nebulous backdrop of fetuses and the words “Aborted Fetal Tissue in Vaccines.”

“Plotkin admits to butchering 76 aborted normally developing fetuses, all over three months old, in just one of the many studies that led to the development of his vaccine,” Kennedy wrote, complaining that in a press conference earlier today, the governor “accused me of promoting conspiracy theories because I told him … that some Americans had religious objections to the MMR vaccine because it contained fetal tissue.”

Kennedy also complained that Shapiro had “accused me of promoting misinformation” on vaccine safety and efficacy that is partly to blame for the decline in Pennsylvania’s MMR vaccination rates – from about 97% for high school seniors to 93% in kindergarten classrooms statewide, dropping below the 95% threshold experts say confers herd immunity against viral disease.

“It’s unfortunately true that the government lockdowns, deceptions, manipulation, and overreach during Covid severely damaged public faith in the vaccine program,” he wrote. “Governor Shapiro’s press conference was an example of the same species of gaslighting.”

As secretary, however, Kennedy fired all 17 members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the panel of top vaccine experts that long served as a national authority. While the reconstituted committee has essentially halted activity, Kennedy has spearheaded efforts to reduce the federal immunization schedule from 17 to 11 vaccines, waving aside scientific consensus by questioning the value of many shots.

Across the commonwealth, public health leaders were alarmed by Kennedy’s latest efforts to sow doubts about the MMR vaccines, which have been safely used for generations, essentially eradicating measles in America before the vaccine-hesitancy movement facilitated its recent resurgence.

“Misinformation such as this only serves to create fear and doubt about what is an accepted scientific fact: vaccines save lives,” Andrew Lutzkanin, a physician who is the president of the Pennsylvania Academy of Family Physicians, told City & State.

“While human cell lines were used to grow these viruses when the vaccines were first developed, recent claims that they continue to contain ‘aborted fetal tissue’ represents a misunderstanding of how vaccines are manufactured today.”

Pediatrician Paul Offit, the co-director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the co-creator of the 2006 rotavirus vaccine, dismissed Kennedy’s claims as “the usual anti-vaccine tropes.”

The original rubella component of the MMR vaccine was grown by Plotkin in a cell line sent to Penn’s Wistar Institute by a Swedish researcher who had obtained fetal cells from an elective abortion half a century ago, but “it’s not like they use new abortive material,” Offit explained.

He also dismissed Kennedy’s religious objections argument. “Where RFK Jr. is wrong is to in any way imply that that’s the issue for the Mennonites, because it’s not,” he went on, referring to one of the religious communities at the heart of the current Lancaster outbreak. “The Mennonite Church supports vaccination.”

And while residual fragments of human DNA are present in vaccines, he said, the Catholic Church ruled decades ago “that Catholics can certainly use vaccines because the Catholic Church, like all churches, cares about human life, and vaccines help preserve human life.”

Plotkin – now 94 – “has argued, and maybe correctly, that he’s probably prevented more abortions than the Catholic Church,” added Offit. That’s because before Plotkin’s rubella vaccine was available, thousands of women suffered spontaneous abortions due to rubella infections contracted while pregnant, while legions more “would decide to abort their child because they were infected in the first trimester and they didn’t want to deliver a child who was blind, deaf, and disabled, and had heart defects,” common outcomes of rubella in utero.

“What was Stanley trying to do? He was trying to prevent the 20,000 cases of congenital birth defects that occurred every year in this country, and he did it: We eliminated rubella from this country in 2005. So thank you, Dr. Plotkin,” Offit said. “And good for Gov. Shapiro.”

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‘These are changes that matter’: Pennsylvania will receive over $500 million from Meta settlement

Justin Sweitzer — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 16:17:20 -0400

Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday revealed that Pennsylvania is expected to receive at least $516 million as the result of a landmark settlement between Meta and a coalition of states that sued the social media giant, alleging that it intentionally designed its social media apps to attract and addict children and teens.

The $17.1 billion settlement, which is still pending and awaits court approval, will also usher in major changes to how content on Facebook and Instagram is presented to younger users. Sunday said the settlement will bring “a complete transformation” to how children and teens experience Meta platforms.

Under the terms of the settlement, Meta has agreed to do the following:

Establish a two-hour daily time limit for teens that can only be turned off with a parent’s permission
Restrict teen use of its platforms during school and nighttime hours
Provide the option of a non-algorithmic feed for teen users
Implement regular prompts and pauses to prevent excessive use
Disable the visibility of likes and reactions, as well as cosmetic and makeup filters, for teen users
Adopt and implement an age assurance framework with age verification measures
Give parents additional information about teen app usage, interactions with suspicious accounts and attempts to change protective settings

Sunday said at a press conference that the settlement will bring significant financial resources to the commonwealth and major changes to how young users interact with Meta-owned apps like Facebook and Instagram. The attorney general said that Pennsylvania will receive at least $516 million, and potentially up to $729 million, under the terms of the settlement.

“This money will remediate social media harms for youth across the commonwealth,” Sunday said. “But to be very clear, this settlement is not just about money – it includes meaningful protections aimed at addressing the harms that social media can cause young people.”

Meta said the agreement will build on existing efforts the company has undertaken to protect teens on its platforms. The company also encouraged other social media platforms, including TikTok and YouTube, to follow its lead.

“We want to ensure teens benefit from this new industry standard, but we cannot do it alone,” the company said Wednesday in an open letter. “These protections will only be truly effective if we work with our peers – TikTok and YouTube – to put the same measures in place.”

C.J. Mahoney, Meta’s chief legal officer, said in a statement that the agreement’s terms will empower parents to manage how their children use Meta platforms, while underscoring the need for other social media platforms to adopt similar changes.

“Our new Time Limit commitments, Night Mode features and usage limits during school hours set the right path forward for our whole industry, but this framework will only work if all our peers join us,” Mahoney said. “As a parent, I’m proud of both the work Meta has done to protect kids historically, and of this new groundbreaking agreement. But its success depends on all other social media platforms following Meta’s lead.”

Matthew P. Bergman, a founding attorney with the Social Media Victims Law Center, said in a statement that the settlement agreement “is a watershed moment in holding the tech giant accountable for designing products it knew were harming children and fueling a nationwide youth mental health crisis.”

“Over the past year, Meta has suffered overwhelming defeats in courts across the country as expert testimony and its own internal documents revealed that senior executives ignored repeated warnings that its products were addictive and harmful by design,” Bergman said. “They chose profit over the lives of our children.”

“Today is a day that we honor the memories of the children who have been lost or harmed because of social media,” he added. “We honor the families who have worked tirelessly over the last five years to seek justice for their children, and to educate other families and young people about the dangers of social media so that no parent ever has to experience the heartbreak they have lived through. What began with a single lawsuit has grown into a national movement that is now sweeping across the world to protect children.”

Bergman said the work to protect children from harms presented by social media platforms is far from over: “We will continue fighting for the individual families whose children will never come home, and for those still struggling with mental health crises caused by these platforms. Accountability to the public is important – but accountability to the families harmed must remain our focus.”

Throughout his first term, Attorney General Sunday has focused heavily on the impacts of social media and the broader tech landscape. He told City & State in an interview earlier this year that technological innovations should not come at the expense of protecting children: “Innovation and technology are not mutually exclusive from protecting children,” he said. “We can do both, and we must do both.”

This month, Sunday announced separate lawsuits against TikTok and Snapchat. In a press conference announcing the suit, he said TikTok “intentionally designed” its app to be addictive to young people, and made similar claims against Snapchat, accusing the platform of breaching the state’s consumer protection laws.

The attorney general said Wednesday that the $17 billion settlement “marks a new beginning for the social media industry.”

“These are changes that matter because they directly address how young people interact with these platforms, how long they use them, when they use them, what they are exposed to on these platforms and the role that parents can play in keeping them safe – and that’s the point,” Sunday said.

“We can’t simply tell parents to do better while allowing technology companies to design platforms that are engineered to addict children and keep them coming back,” he added. “Parents deserve better. Children deserve better. And today shows that Big Tech can do better – some just chose not to. Today is the first step in forcing Big Tech to do better.”

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Snap decision: AG Sunday files lawsuit against social media giant over lack of teen safeguards

Greg Salisbury — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 16:07:12 -0400

If the legal teams at X weren’t paying close attention to Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday before Tuesday afternoon, they are now.

For the second time this month, Sunday filed a lawsuit against a social media company. After targeting TikTok on Aug. 11, Sunday announced Tuesday that he was filing suit against Snapchat for what he said were breaches of the commonwealth’s consumer protection laws, especially regarding how the company handles young users of its app.

“This is a very serious legal action with the end goals of being an overhaul of how Snapchat markets and advertises its app; design changes to discourage compulsive use; and safeguards so that families can decide what their children can access online,” Sunday said. He pointed out the similarities between this suit and the one against TikTok as well: “That lawsuit also alleges violations of Pennsylvania's consumer protection laws. It also regards dishonesty in marketing, and that its addictive design harms users, particularly young people. Both of these actions reflect my priority as attorney general to protect our young people from tech giants who are choosing growth at all costs over the mental wellness of its users.”

The 49-page complaint seeks to protect the youngest Snap users from a host of issues, including what it says are the app’s addictive design, its content, and the unauthorized screenshotting and sharing of posts they mistakenly think will just disappear, as the app says.

“A simple screenshot can turn what they thought was a temporary photo into a permanent nightmare,” Sunday said, adding that “Snapchat’s ephemeral component also harms children in other ways. We allege it encourages predators online to be even more aggressive in contacting and grooming kids … I can’t think of anything more concerning than predators having access to kids in arenas where they feel even more free to act deviantly, and that same feeling of freedom could also apply to cyber bullies who might think that they can get away with posting more on Snap, where their threats, their insults, and their destructive commentary will simply disappear.”

The lawsuit could have wide-ranging implications for the state’s teens. According to a December 2025 report from the Pew Research Center, 55% of American teens use Snapchat – a statistic that means roughly 450,000 of the state’s 807,000 teenagers are on the app – and, Sunday said, those users open the app an average of 30 times a day.

Sunday was joined by state Senate Communication & Technology Committee Chair Tracy Pennycuick, who introduced Senate Resolution 244, establishing the Task Force on Child Protection in the Digital Age, chaired by Sunday. The occasion was supposed to be a bipartisan showing – state House Communication & Technology Committee Chair Joe Ciresi couldn’t attend, but provided a statement of support that Sunday read in his absence.

Pennycuick seconded Sunday’s rationale for filing the lawsuit, emphasizing that the company “downplayed the prevalence of mature content on its platform while deliberately using features designed to keep young people scrolling, watching, and coming back. When a company places engagement and advertising revenue ahead of a child’s well-being, Pennsylvania has a responsibility to act.”

Pennsylvania is far from the first state to try to bring Snap to heel. Seven other states – Arkansas, Florida, Kansas, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas and Nevada – have brought legal action against the company for what they have alleged is the failure of the company to protect young users, including for its failure to protect minors from sexual exploitation and sextortion, child sex abuse material and deceptive practices.

Sunday’s focus on bringing accountability to social media companies – his office is also part of a multi-state lawsuit brought against Meta by numerous attorneys general – hews closely to how he explained his priorities to City & State in an extensive interview earlier this year, highlighting the need for a balance between innovation and public safety. “Innovation and technology are not mutually exclusive from protecting children. We can do both, and we must do both. It’s that simple,” Sunday said.

In response to a request for comment, a company spokesperson stated: “The allegations against Snap fundamentally misrepresent our platform and our approach to teen safety.”

“We share the Attorney General’s commitment to protecting young people online and are disappointed they have chosen litigation rather than working with us toward that shared goal,” the spokesperson continued. “We remain focused on strengthening and enhancing the safeguards, tools, and educational resources that support the safety, privacy, and well-being of all Snapchatters.”

While Sunday refused to get into specifics about which social-media companies he would target next, he made it clear that more lawsuits could be on the horizon. “I don’t want to go into great detail on that, but I will tell you that we are actively looking at other companies as well,” he said. “Any company that’s using their product to harm children is something we’re looking at.”

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‘Completely preventable’: Pennsylvania now has two fatal measles cases – the first in the U.S. this year

Harrison Cann — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 14:08:07 -0400

Pennsylvania has its first two measles deaths in 35 years – and the first deaths reported in the U.S. this year.

Both individuals from Lancaster County were unvaccinated.

“This is a serious and a growing problem across the country, and right here in our commonwealth,” Gov. Josh Shapiro said Tuesday at a press conference inside Lancaster General Health's Women & Babies Hospital.

Shapiro, joined by Pennsylvania Health Secretary Dr. Debra Bogen and leaders from Lancaster area hospitals, said “we hope and pray those deaths will be the last.”

“I want to be clear: This illness and death from measles is completely preventable,” he added.

Since April, when Pennsylvania’s largest measles outbreak in recent history began, the commonwealth has recorded 393 measles cases. Shapiro noted that of the confirmed cases – now the highest number in the state since 1992 – nearly 20% of the individuals have been hospitalized. Every hospitalization involved an individual who was not fully vaccinated.

“The vaccine is the best tool we have for preventing the spread of this disease,” Shapiro said Tuesday. “This disease does not respect county lines or religious lines – it goes after all who are unprotected.”

Public health experts say the true number of measles victims is almost certainly many times higher, since the disease is highly contagious – nine out of every 10 people exposed will get sick within three weeks – and infected family members may not bother with testing.

And, according to the state Department of Health, the vast majority of cases in the commonwealth have been reported in Lancaster and Chester counties – areas where traditional Christian groups, such as Amish and Mennonites, constitute a significant share of those county’s populations.

But, Shapiro stressed, the outbreak in Pennsylvania is now in 28 different counties and is in multiple communities statewide.

“Both from a religious perspective and from a broader community perspective, it would not be fair for anyone here to conclude that this is just a problem in one particular community,” he told reporters.

Pennsylvania’s prognosis

While childhood vaccination rates have been falling steadily, Pennsylvania’s measles vaccination rates have been improving recently. Shapiro said providers across the state typically administer roughly 25,000 doses of the measles vaccine in a month, but last month that figure reached about 35,000.

“The most critical step we can take is making sure that those who are not currently protected receive the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine, also called MMR,” Bogen said Tuesday. “The MMR vaccine is backed by decades of research and real-life, real-world proof that it is the best way to protect you and your family from measles, providing 97% lifelong protection after two doses.”

She noted that based on 2025-2026 school year data, the state estimates more than 93% of kindergarteners, more than 94% of 7th-graders and more than 96% of 12th-graders in the commonwealth have received both doses of the MMR vaccine. The state Department of Health will also roll out 40 additional vaccination and information clinics in the coming weeks to provide greater outreach.

Herd immunity – when a large part of a community becomes immune to a disease, making it hard for the infection to spread – requires more than 95% of a community to be vaccinated.

“Because the MMR vaccine essentially eliminated measles here in the United States decades ago, people have forgotten how serious it can be, especially for the very young, the pregnant, and the very old,” Bogen added.

In late July, the number of confirmed measles cases in the U.S. surpassed the total reported for all last year, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Last year's total of 2,289 – which has already been surpassed in 2026 – was previously the highest number of recorded measles cases in more than 30 years.

U.S. Health & Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his “Make America Healthy Again” movement ushered in a vaccine-skeptical approach at the federal level last year, including a recent push to dramatically pare back America’s childhood immunization schedule.

Five years ago, Kennedy spoke on a farm in Lancaster County and delivered a warning to the local Amish community about the nation’s public health agencies, downplaying the infectious disease and effectiveness of vaccination.

“The cure for measles is chicken soup and vitamin A,” Kennedy claimed at the event.

Before the measles vaccine became available in 1963, the disease killed 400 to 500 Americans annually. Symptoms typically appear one to two weeks after exposure; in addition to the infamous rash, they include high fever, cough, runny nose and red, watery eyes.

When taking questions from the media, Shapiro said Kennedy called him this morning and that he was “very blunt” with the secretary about the “negative impacts” he’s having on the misinformation front.

“I made very clear that his actions and the rhetoric that's coming from this administration are having a negative impact on communities across America, particularly right here in Pennsylvania. That there’s real-life consequences to spreading misinformation,” Shapiro told reporters Tuesday. “There’s real-life consequences to scaring people and not relying on actual doctors and actual medical professionals to provide unbiased information to parents, so that we can make reasonable decisions for our kids.”

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